@Vitaliy_Kiselev
With PTool 3.61, Kae's 65Mbit settings did span right? I wonder what differences were made since @CBrandin's 44Mbit/66Mbit settings do not span. The bitrate is the same... does it have to do with Quantizer settings or where any other changes made to PTool that could influence this? Should there be a team to research this?

Keep up the good work!

All my settings are proven stable video buffers maximising bandwidth. ANY crashes now are down to the camera settings (ISO/shutter speed). Even on a crash many of my settings still write a file - and the buffers (using Elecard buffer analysis) still look great - not dives into zero land. The crashes tend to happen on extreme limits. If you take my 220M AQ2 GOP1 example - the buffers are virtually constant. They resolve amazing IQ. For certain shots especially in darkness with a little light, its bloody amazing. But if you want extreme detail on say bushes/trees of death eventually the write to the sd card will stop. There are absolutely NO buffer underruns or overruns. period. The graphs look good - nice stable waves - no zero drops.

Its now down to taming the i frames at extreme detail. So in a way, I am working in a backwards principle to @cbrandin, Chris is working from bottom settings upwards with precision adjustments of Frame buffers and limits etc... to achieve top quality with stability, I am coming from the other end - to achieve maximised use of the available buffers and then to try and harnass the memory bandwidth given to i frames to achieve stability. So far we have reached peak bandwidth - we now need to adjust some of the other settings to pull it back down under high shutter/ISO etc.

I guess it wont be long before our settings meet in the middle somewhere... either way we need more testing of these found settings and to adjust (fine tune) them accordingly. Please experiment.

PS My 132M GOP3 AQ2 should NOT crash at all. Other settings I have posted below you can experiment changing AQ4 to AQ2 - and you should more stable success at higher detail objects/movement. I have stable buffers and excellent resolving IQ on GOP 3, 6 and 12 higher than 132M. These are brilliant for filmmakers but perhaps not so good for regular GH2 users who simply need to span files for documentary / long recordings etc.. ;-)

chrimsbroome,
The 4GB limit has nothing to do with the memory card. It is how the FAT (file allocation table) is defined for how the GH2 writes and reads from the memory card.

The GH2 uses FAT32
Like I mentioned in my earlier post. Do the math, FAT32 is capable of > 2^32 (power)=~ 4GB.

Since the hack involves additional processing increase, the GH2 with the increase demand from the hack on higher datarate may have a bottleneck due to either hardware, or how the code is written. Like Vitaliy mentioned above, he has not determined if this span issue is a hardware limited issue and "is very complicated and very slow to test".

On a stock GH2, on long video takes, when the file sizes gets larger than 4GB, it automaticaly creates another sequential file (up to 4GB) until your card is full. So if you were to record non-stop on a 16GB SDHC card you should have four 4GB files on the card before it's full.

On a long recording, If you're using settings with the hack great than 32Mb/s, just remember to stop your recording before it uses 4GB on the card, then restart it back up and continue recording.

Driftwood,
Thanks again for your strive to find the highest stable possible from the GH2 using Vitaliy's current 3.62d.

Another approach, which I believe you're heading to now, is to crank the ISO to MAX (3200), increase the shutter speed to max, and shoot high detail such as Papas Death Chart (and other high detail footage).

Now, you could use the above settings as your reference, start at your highest bitrate settings and work down until it's stable. Then, maybe drop it down a bit more from there so we're not "hanging on the edge" of just working.

Great work!

@proaudio4 Middle of page. Use the set J settings.

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/699/avchd-maximum-image-quality-settings-and-testing/p6

@driftwood, thanks- yes I understand about the Fat32 table. Do you think that GH2 can format a SDXC memory card to a exfat table spec or is it only restricted too fat32? spec. Because if Panasonic say a SDXC card will work in it (as it is stamped on the side of the camera). Then practically speaking the limit thing should be solved but I dont have a SDXC card to test the span issue.

@driftwood , Your settings 132Mbits 3GOP operate flawlessly for me. Recently I gelled on the lakes and I had no suspension of work with the camera settings on the card Transcend 32GB Class 10 and Class 10 Toshiba 16GB. Horny!

I tested @driftwood today a lot filming cars and some landscape. God, what beautiful details I could get! The camera just "crashed" two times, using 720p with the shutter in 1/125. I used the Sandisk Extreme 35mb/s and, as I was with a t2i with magic lantern using the Pro 45mb/s card, I tried it too. Using the Pro, the same 720p settings did not crash even once, BUT, when I returned the 35mbs card to the camera, it did not crash too. So I could not reproduce the 2 crashes again. I don't know if it was because the the light changing of the day or something else I did. I'll install this last one right now in the camera and shoot tomorrow again. I'm with two cams, so I can get the GH2 just for testing!
I can't thank you all enought for doing such a great job!

word

6 GOP - Its incredible for gigs... filming one at the moment :-)

@driftwood GOP 6 is the sweet setting for me when it comes to fast motion but theres no way I'm trying your 220M setting, I may love it too much and then have to spend a load of cash on SD cards. I'll stick with bkmcwd's 66M GOP 6 for now. I am going to give that 220M GOP 1 a spin though, just to see it.

Edit The 220M GOP 6, does it always produce P-Frames the same size as I-Frames on static detail ? Or is that just a deathchart phenomena ? In fact its really odd that the ratio between I, B and P frames is like that on the deathchart to me, it looks wasteful.

@Driftwood.

Latest gop 6 220 settings are amazing. Thanks. :)

The 132mb results are so beautiful that I am afraid to try the 220mb lol