P.S. I sent Apefos a message but am still waiting to hear from him, just thought I'd try all possible avenues to figure this out.

I did some research in the forum about PTools settings but I did not find the answers I need...

What happens is:

Only GOP which works good for 720p 60p are GOP 30 and GOP 3, all other GOP gives diagonal pattern (rain) in computer monitor. But the GOP 3 in 720p always stops recording and it seems the card is not the problem, I am using Sandisk 45mbps and other people says the Sandisk 95mbps also stops recording in 720p hacks... The GOP 6, 12 and 15 works for some shoots, but they are unstable (sometimes stops recording) and gives diagonal pattern (rain) in computer monitor. GOP 3 stops recording all the time, no matter the bitrate (I tested GOP 3 from 40 to 200mbps). So GOP 30 is the only option.

Problem is: when using the GOP 30 the camera encoder always keeps the bitrate very low when the camera is quiet, when there is no motion in the image, and this gives lots of macroblocking and texture lost in low light. Even when I set the bitrate to 48mbps or 64mbps in PTools the camera does not record 48mbps or 64mbps, StreamParser shows only around 23mbps... (for static low light shoots)

The auto quantizer all to motion or all to details did not make any difference. So I did some try to change settings in TESTER options of PTools. I fount the TOP and BOTTOM bitrate limits and I enabled it with 48000 and 42000 for top and bottom 720p, but this makes no effects in encoding, bitrate is still very low for static shots no matter the bitrate I type in PTools...

Only thing I found to make the bitrate encoding keep high is the GOP 3, but camera stops recording in all 720p shoots, the GOP 3 just works for 1080p.

So I am wondering if there is a way to keep the bitrate high using GOP 30 in 720p...

Any suggestion welcome, thanks.

I've been tinkering with my camera set up. I wanted to monitor what I was shooting on a bigger screen, and wanted to use my macbook pro retina as the monitor. I bought a blackmagic intensity shuttle, connected it via HDMI to the shuttle and the shuttle to my mac via thunderbolt.

At first I had no picture - the camera was set to 24p cinema mode at FH.... but, in order to get the camera working through Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 capture function (and the blackmagic media express software) I had to change the settings on the software to 1080i 50 - so it looks like both pieces of software think the camera is spitting out 1080i 50 rather than 1080p 24.

As a result, I have 2 questions:

1 - does using an HDMI monitor change the footage captured on the SD card in the camera from 24p 1080p to 50 1080i? If not, then that's fine, I only want to monitor the footage and can cope with a visual change showing on my Mac. If so, then.... we have an issue.... 2 - is there a hack or option in ptools that will keep it at 24 1080p if it does affect the SD card recorded footage? I'm using Flowmotion v2 at the moment.

@Vitaliy_Kiselev - can you, or any of the geniuses on here help?

Many thanks,

Rob

How do I get rid of it ?

This is the FAQ to read if you're trying to read the forums, and finding a lot of technical stuff and acronyms that are going right over your head. It won't make you design hacks as good as Driftwood's or Sanity or Cake, and it won't tell you which hack is the best one to use. But if you read it, you will understand what I-frames and P-frames are, what GOP is, what intraframing and interframing are, and a few other details that'll help you follow some of the discussions here.

http://www.personal-view.com/faqs/gh2-hack/hack-terms-faq

First time user, simple question.

Based on the various hack settings, I'm instructed to input a variety of values for Scaling I P B. However, I'm becoming frustrated because under the quantizer scaling tables section in Ptools the only options I see are Scaling high, med, low T1, T2, T3.

What am I supposed to do about these scaling settings? No problems other than this.

Thanks.

I've ran into a slight problem. I downloaded the new ptools and now when I try to load a patch from 'my populars' basket, it wont recognize the patches/ files. I can however make a patch of my own and save it. Am I the culprit here or is this a glitch of some kind? Pardon my ignorance, I'm not new to this but l'm no genus either, this is the first problem with using ptools, it might be me, and if it is I'd like to know what i'm doing wrong. Thanks in advance

I do not know if anybody has reported the solution before, at least I could not find one here or the rest of the internet, but I faced this problem today and eventually found a fix.

The solution is that the SOURCE firmware, the one you load at the beginning, needs to be correctly named as well. When the problem happened to me, I had made a copy/paste duplicate of the very original Panasonic firmware that I had downloaded from the internet. This had resulted to a source filename "GH1__132 - Copy.bin"

One would imagine that it makes no difference, as PTool requests the user to give a name when saving and that is the only thing that has to pass the validity check. However, for some reason the original filename, probably "-" or " " character, echoes the saving procedure and the validity test is failed. For instance, when I finally tested renaming the source firmware first back to "GH1__132.bin and then saving it with the name"GH1__133.bin", it was suddenly again very acceptable name and finally got my hacked firmware saved.

Basic Info

Patches For End Users

• E1 >= E2 >= E3 >= E4: http://timelapser.net/about/ says "MJPEG quality settings are a tradeoff between image quality and recording duration. Setting E1 Table: 4 makes a big difference. My understanding is that the E1 Quality/Table setting is used initially and E2/E3/E4 are a fallback if the camera can’t keep up. As we’re only recording at 2fps this is unlikely to be a problem, but I recommend using settings that descend down from your E1 quality setting. E1 Quality: 400 will give you super-high quality jpegs, but only about twenty minutes of recording time at 1080p."

• F1 >= F2 >= F3 >= F4: Prolly similar to the E* family

• Video Bitrate FSH/SH: for 1080i60 FSH and 720p60 SH
• Video Bitrate FH/H: for 1080i60 SH and 720p60 H
• Video Bitrate 24H: for 1080p24 H
• Video Bitrate 24L: for 1080p24 L

Patches For Testers

• Video Bitrate 24H ADD: How is it different from the end user's Video Bitrate 24H setting? @Vitaliy Very different. You can try to use it for testing, but normally you don't need to.
• Overall Bitrate & Bitrate 2: This applies to all video modes? @Vitaliy Yes. It is some time related constant, in fact. Not bitrate. But it can affect bitrate.

• Quantizer tables: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/366/pro-avchd-quantization-process No freaking idea. Maybe @driftwood's post helps.
• Quantizer scaling tables: See @driftwood's post
• Frame buffer size: It covers all modes.
• Encoder frame limit: What?
• Bitrate settings: High Top, High Bottom, Low Top, Low Bottom? Always keep lower bitrate settings within 95-70% of high bitrate settings. Otherwise, you'll see a dramatic bitrate drop in the low modes. There is currently a known drop in bitrate in the first frame set or GOP - known as the blip. Still to find out a definitive answer as to why.

Misc