SANITY 4 and 5.1

mo7ies

IMHO, hacked GH2 is still an experiment as a video camera. So I would not rely on it 100% in any case.

Having said that, Sanity v5 never let me down so far. I use it a lot and it is brilliant: no issues whatsoever on the card I use, and super reliable spanning in 24H mode. And of course very low bitrate, yet nice video quality. Love it - bravo, Ralph_B!

safari

@mo7ies..I second that with the 90MB/s ....no problems with 24P H. Only problem I have experienced is an occasional write error in ETC mode. I am using Sanity 5 to shoot a wedding this weekend so I am trusting in it (fingers crossed...:)

Ralph_B

Regarding Stability:

One thing I learned in developing Sanity is that I had to test for stability at both ends of the ISO spectrum. Initially I thought testing at ISO 12800 was the worst case scenario (and it is as far as noise is concerned). But the exceptionally clean picture at ISO 160 can cause write errors, as well. So it was necessary for me to fine tune Sanity to be stable at both ISO extremes, and hopefully everything in the middle follows along.

By your reports, it seems to be working.

peternap

@ Ralph_B I just finished testing Sanity 5 and Flow Motion V2.2 with my new 14-140. I hardly ever use electronic lenses but I have to admit I like this for some instances.

In 720P-60 I can lock FM2.2 up every time I stress it hard. 24P isn't as bad. I have yet to lock up or have an error with Sanity 5

By stress I mean high ISO or very bright light with very detailed outdoor scenes. I locked it up on a bear the other day at about 15 yards,

The errors require battery removal.

I;m using a 32 gig 95mb in the FM camera and a 32 gig 45 mb in the Sanity Camera.

I have no idea how Rambo got his water shots using FM and the 14-140 in 720????? FM may handle 720-50 better.

I'm going back to the Chesapeake Bay this evening with one camera using Sanity 5 and the other loaded with Sedna AQ1.

LPowell

@peternap Have you tried using Flow Motion v2.02 in "H" mode for shooting in extreme situations at 720p60? This will work exactly the same as SH mode, but will safely limit the bitrate to 60Mbps peak. I provided FM2's H mode to reliably handle both the highly stressful situations you describe and also to support 4GB file-spanning on Class 10 SD cards 30MB/sec and faster.

The 720p60 SH mode in Flow Motion v2 is not tweaked to be bulletproof under the most adverse conditions - it's designed to be failsafe. That means that even in the event of failure, it will stop recording rather than produce a corrupted video or one with degraded image quality. As I documented in my FM2 thread, many patches, including both Sanity 5 and the unhacked GH2 firmware, will surreptitiously produce coarse quality Fallback Mode videos when shooting highly detailed subjects. The only sure way to detect these corrupted videos is to examine all of your footage in Stream Parser, which is not a practical post-production workflow.

In my view, the GH2's consumer-style Fallback Mode is completely unacceptable for semi-pro use of the camera - I'd much rather the camera stop recording than produce insidiously degraded footage.

Zeko

@LPowell : interesting opinion, but have there been any studies/reports on hardware degradation due to record stops or camera lock down that require battery removal ? (like if now, 2012, anybody has experienced a broken/unusable GH2, possibly due to this kind of circumstances), or is the hardware super resilient ?

This would be interesting for me to decide which patch(es) to use during my semi-pro work in fiction and documentary.

LPowell

@Zeko I've never seen any reports of permanent damage to a Panasonic camera through the use of any of my patches. To my knowledge, none of the early speculation about GH1 or GH2 cameras overheating or wearing out from the use of high bitrate patches has ever been backed up with any tangible evidence.

arvidtp

For what its worth, I crash audio DSPs and microcontrollers all the time at work (mostly because i'm a forgetful programmer). Never hurts 'em. Just reset and reboot.

peternap

@LPowell I haven't tried Lee. I will tomorrow though. It is an exceptional patch,especially in very low light.

Rambo

Guys, you don't need to do a battery pull, just wait after you get the card write error message for about 20-30 seconds, the message will change and then you can do a power off. I've never had to do a hard reset yet (battery pull on lockup) on GH1 or GH2.

And yes 720p 50 is less likely to fail than 60.

tida

@Ralph_B, could Sanity 5 be split into two patches. One into 24p/50i/60i and the other into 25p/30p/50p/60p. Would be great that it could be mixed up partly with FlowMotion, Cake, Driftwood patches etc.

Would be great to mix long term recording (timelapses) with highest quality recording.

Ralph_B

@tida

Unfortunately, no. Sanity 5 is a unique package - everything needs to be as it is, for it to work.

peternap

@Rambo I figured as much Rambo. I expect it's a buffer issue and just has to catch up. The problem is it seems to happen when I'll lose the shot if I don't do something right then (My language also gets worse the longer I wait).

I'll try out Lee's suggestion about using H and see how the IQ is.

I like a lot of these patches but keep coming back here for a lot reasons, stability and the out of camera images cut so well with my camcorders are big ones. It may be different if I were an artsy person, but I'm not.

peternap

@Ralph_B This is a grab from a test the other day. I'm not much of a pixel peeker and don't see a lot of the "Mess" others apparently do. I just don't see any major macro blocking. Sanity 5 720-60

Ralph_B

@peternap This picture looks fine.

crunchy

@Ralph_B

Ralph_B wrote: @crunchy Sanity 4.1 and 5 are totally reliable for spanning in 24L if you use Sandisk Extreme HD Video 30MB/s cards. I can't speak for other cards. mo7ies has obviously had good success with SanDisk 64GB SDXC Memory Card Extreme Pro Class 10 UHS-I.

My answer: They did not prove to be reliable on Sandisk Extreme 45MB/s 32GB cards (measured speed on my laptop was also about 45MB/s). I used 20mm pancake lens in manual focus mode during shot. Sometimes it spans, sometimes not.

I am sorry for such messy answer. Namely, Personal View forum editor can't show the original comment in a box (with automatically writen poster's name and other data in a header), like in most other forums. At least I haven't found such an option. Therefore, it's harder to follow discussions.

peternap

@crunchy I think all cards have their own personality Crunchy. Yesterday I spent 5 hours videoing an old sailing Schooner, lots of flapping sails and water, rough seas, bright sunlight, ropes, blocks and lots of detail that should have been a card killer. I was using a Sandisk Extreme 45mb card in the Sanity 5 camera. Some of the time I locked the camera down and used the other one with Flow Motion 2.2 to get other details. The Sanity camera had a 14-140 lens in autofocus mode.

The Sanity camera never balked. It spanned when it was locked down and gave great image quality.

No problems with FM either but I was using a 64 gig 95mb in that.

Not all 45mb cards are created equal.

julientom

Hi everyone ! Thanks a lot for all these wonderfull patches ! I use sanity 5 on two GH2 in HBR 25p. I have great quality on outdoor panoramas. But I have a serious doubt about quality for some static shots for ITWs. I found these 2 pictures have a lot of compression on the face of the lady. These was shot with olympus zuico 50mm@f2 and voitglander nokton 25m@1,2 iso was 160 or 320 max i don't remember. I didn't want to surexpose the background so she's not very very bright... Could you guys tell me what you think about it

thanks a lot

(just for the report : - I only crashed with sanity5 repeativily on some panoramic movement with sun in my face - I can span without any problem on both the GH2 and the GF2 )

murph100

@Julientom, IMO the hack is not the problem here, that shot is not going to work unless you light it ( or expose for the face ), also there is slight motion blur and the plane of focus is actually behind her face ( look at the collar ), the DOF on those lenses wide open is only a few millimeters so focus is crucial.

julientom

@murph100 hello and thanks for your answer ! I agree with the tiny DOF and the light. Still this does not explain compression here... does it ? If I undertand, what you're saying is that the GH2 just does not handle light between 0 and 50% of luma level ? I'm not a pro canon, but I think the same shot on a 5D would not show that kind of compression in low light... Don't you think that a 80mb patch would have allow a bigger bitrate one that static shot and less compression ? Have a look at the color and the detail on the cheek...this looks really not good (codec compressed) and the cheek is not that dark

crunchy

@peternap But if measured reading/writing speeds are about 45MB/s on my laptop, there are no more personalities. The cards are up to specifications.

I would just like to add that on two occasions the first span worked, but the second one did not. Have you checked for several spans?

peternap

@crunchy I know I have on V4.1 Crunchy, but I'm not sure about 5. I get testing burnout sometimes. If I get a chance later today, I'll try 5 and see.

Mot of my clips are well under a minute. For interviews and long recordings, I use a camcorder...so unless I'm testing, spanning issues don't show up.

mo7ies

crunchy, cards behave differently in PC readers vs in GH2's card connector. It is necessary to have the "right" card that produces stable results, and hopefully spans. In my experience, CONSISTENTLY this card: goo.gl/gbQf4 is the winner.

islanders66

Hi again, I need Sanity 5 for a shoot tomorrow and also need the audio settings at ACG 0 = 203. I was using a custom 4.1 that already had the audio settings or hack with these settings. Has someone already done this or do I need to preform an aditional audio hack?

I think I found it with thepaulus audio hack and Sanity 5.1. However after installing I can't find the 1-5 audio setting, as before. All I can find is volume settigs 1-6 that don't appear to do anything.

sinfafun

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