I prefer 24p when I need 24p and HBR when I need 30p. Did you really expect a different answer?

no difference in picture quality?

why dont you give it a try by yourself side by side?

Didn't notice much difference when I tried HBR. Was just wondering what other people thought about this issue.

Gabel. re: However, sometimes you need to shoot in 25p (especially in Europe) and the good thing then is that the GH2 sends a proper signal for ProRes recording, which is better when recorded externally.

This interests me! Are you saying one can record 25p via external recorder ? Using HDMI. I thought the HDMI was hamstrung on the GH2 for Progressive?

I haven't tried HBR yet, but from some of the patch-specific threads it looked like it was lower quality than 24H. I have a project that needs to shoot 30P that's coming up in a week. I thought perhaps I'd use 24H at 80% and record audio separately. But with HBR I could record right into the camera, right?

For a 30P project, how significant is the quality issue between 24H @ 80% and HBR? Any patch recommendations for shooting 30P?

Thanks!

Thanks Nomad, very interesting, Do you know how the ProRes file of HBR 25P from a ninja stands up against something like flowmotion 2. I need to do long takes so have been using settings that can span? I'll stop now as I'm probably getting off topic

I love when people make generic sweeping statements that 24p has better picture quality than 30p. You can achieve almost the same bit rates with either one and you will be hard pressed to show a difference in compression in all but the most strenuous situations.

I wouldn't use 24p or 30p for motion. 60p works much better for that.

Really it comes down to whether your final product will be rendered in 24p, 30p, or 60p. If you are rendering to 24p then you can shoot 24p and use it natively, shoot 30p and slow it down to 80%, or shoot 60p and slow it down to 40%.

If you are rendering to 30p or higher then there really isn't a great reason to shoot in 24p.

If you render to 25p then the HBR and 720p @ 50 FPS mode(Slowed down to 50%) will work well.

Trying to mix frame rates without doing slow motion is much more detrimental than compression could ever be.

Besides image quality, 24p and 30p have different look and feel. I wouldn't call one is better than the other. It's like saying red is better than blue.

@kurt111111

Switch to NTSC and use 720p60.

@mpgxsvcd - Agreed. You'll probably get the best results when you shoot with your intended end result in mind. In the case of my project, there will be a lot of motion and the final will be rendered at 30P. I may also shoot some shots in 720 60P so I can slow them down and show the motion better.

@kurt111111

Put it in SH mode.

24p or 80% Slow Mo (but its without Sound) REC modes comparably offer more than HBR. HBR 25/30 and 720p modes don't stand up to the picture quality of 24p due to the nature of picture resolution, memory resources and the way the GH2s encoder is setup to maintain hi quality 50/60 fps. HBR (Hi Bitrate Recording) is just a hack by Pany to yield a half decent looking 25p/30p picture from a encoding/decoding implementation that is 2-3 years old. Yet you can get achieve nice results if you work to its limitations.