@stray thanks for that precise rapid response. Makes sense now, and there i was actually looking into the GH2 official burst mode thinking this had been modified lol.

Yes, with GOP3 you can get bigger I frames, which will offer better gradation rendering, etc... The main advantage of GOP 3 (at least for me), over say... GOP 12, is that GOP3 will span with much higher bitrates than GOP 12. LIkewise, GOP 6 also spans with higher bitrates than GOP 12.

vstardust, after switching between NTSC and PAL you need to power cycle the camera, and then reformat your card, or switch to a different card that was formatted previously with the NTSC/PAL setting you want. This is covered in the FAQs (link at the top of this page).

Combining one person's settings for one mode with another set of settings is tricky, and not always possible due to the fact that different modes share some firmware parameters.

Hi,

I'm looking for advice on which patch to use for my requirements. I'm looking for - best low-light performance for rather static subjects - I don't care much about reliability and spanning as this is for short dramatic stuff which can be repeated if the camera freezes - I'm shooting 1080@25 or 750@50 - I don't care about intra-frame compression for my workflow but if someone says intra-only is the way to go for low light quality, I'll try but it seems such a waste of bandwidth that could be used for quality in parts of the image that are actually moving when I'm shooting a person sitting in the middle of a room and nothing but the eyes or lips of the person are moving

I have tried a number of things including Quantum X Sedna, Cake 2.1 and EOSHD unified 88 but for my test shots in low light, the bitrate was always rather low and all patches had quality issues (very visible compression artefacts) in some areas in almost all shots.

One other thing I have observed in the past is that all these issues are very less severe when having a lot of blue in the lighting. I shot a lot of footage for a short film in a cave where we lit everything with cheap LED lights with blue gels to give it a nightish look and I almost never had any visible compression artifacts and really beautiful footage and that was even with factory settings. But as soon as I make test shots in my dimly lit living room with a small lamp that fills the walls in soft gradients ranging from light yellow to dark red, the picture is so crappy in some places that it cannot be used for anything (of course the severity of those problems differs with the patches I tried but so far none of them didn't have these areas with clearly visible macroblocking combined with banding). Is the codec somewhat optimized for blue or is this something that has a physical or mathematical reason that is well-known?

Thanks for any advice/insight and, of course, thanks for the hack and all the work around it! Apart from the low light problems, I've been a happy user of GH1 and GH2 patches.

rmk, try lowering the quantization setting in Cake. That should give you higher bit rates and higher quality in low light. And post some MTS files. It's difficult to know what you are talking about without samples.

I would like to combine @thepalalias audio patch with @bkmcwd GOLGOP3-13_v4.12 patch but not having much success. Can someone be kind enough to point me to a thread or step me through the process using Ptool v3.65d?

Thanks in advance!

@frerichs on combining settings http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/47090#Comment_47090

rmk, you want to change Patches for testers, AVCHD, Quantizer, Quantizer for 1080 (or 720) modes. This setting is the minimum quantizer setting that the encoder will use. The quantizer setting translates to the quantization parameter that gets used in encoding individual blocks - quantizer setting plus or minus 2 in I-frames generally, and the quantizer setting exactly in P- and B-frames. When the encoder is generating a much lower bit rate than the max, it's usually an indication that the encoder is operating at the minimum quantizer setting. So lowering the minimum should enable lower quantizer settings and higher quality. I've set it to 18 in Cake, which is lower than stock and fine for normal scenes, but perhaps not low enough for very dark scenes that don't have a lot of detail. Try quantizer settings of 16 and 14, maybe 12.

I'll need to see the camera MTS files to know what's going on. Short samples, like 10 seconds, are enough. You can upload to file sharing sites like minus.com or mediafire. Posting in this topic is fine.

HACK HELP:

Can anyone recommend what hack would suit.

I need to record 3 x 3 hour meetings on the same day.

-Picture quality is not a top priority -I've ordered an AC adaptor to get over battery issue -I have 2 X 32g SanDisk Extreme and 2 X 16GB Transcend cards

I'm a newbie to hack world and have been playing about with a number of hacks but have had little success. The closest I have got was using Cluster, which recorded 2hours, up until battery died but then I have not been able to import this clip in to FCP7.

Any tips or advice would be appreciated.

Michael

@orlandopiano.. this is film mode settings for Noise reduction, saturation etc, in menu under Motion picture.

@xtra00: if quality is not an issue, why don't you just go with the official firmware settings and only remove the record time limit with ptools? check how long you could record in 720p H mode.

@Safari, thanks a bunch!

No, just load the camera with the next settings you want to use. Watch how to rename the next bin in PTool, then its easy.