@toxotis I guess it's a matter of preference, however I should point out that those are from still photography guides, I work with DoPs with 20+ years experience and they all underexpose by at least one stop, and this advice is seconded in a lot of books on digital video cinematography. In good part that is because life-like skin tones are best generated when you keep that in 18% or lower (eg where a grey card would register), aka Zone 5 (maybe Zone 6). You go above that, which you would if you are exposing to the right, and you start to push skin tones into a zone where much of the colour detail is lost and they get washed out, "chalky" and unrealistic. Once they are in this zone it is difficult to pull them back in colour correct because you can't get back colour detail you never had in the first place (whereas if you are underexposed, you can always loose a bit). Anyway, this is my last comment on this topic because I realize it is off topic somewhat -- the connection I would make is that with GOP1 and high bit rates, you can rescue under exposed skin tones.

You may have seen this already, but check out my video at for an example of how under exposing leads to proper skin tones -- it got crunched a bit more by vimeo, and yes, a lot of it pushed off to the left and goes to black, which might be a problem with landscape photography, but for video work, the golden rule, which I think most people do not realize, is expose for skin tones, which generally means under exposing one stop and, if necessary, fiddling a tiny bit with colour correct in post if it is too dark, which thankfully, we finally can do with driftwood's high bit rate low GOP patches.

@sam_stickland ups, sorry, you are right i should analyse first the bitrate of the 2 vids, before jumping to conclussions

seAQuake test: Here's one for the great mathmaticians. I just used Panasonic's utility 'Restore AVCCAM' which recovered a first recording on the card 00000.mts which had failed to span to... wait for it... 8.59 Gb!!!! A strange anomolity or is there more to what is going on than we know on the Panny seafloor!? I mean 639mbps is like a UFO flying out of the water...

btw The recording looks fucking amazing.

its a little personal - my girlfriend - nothing rude - but f2 on a 50mm macro - up very close - exposes all her age lines etc... so I dont think Ill be uploading it to Dropbox. But I would like others to try out Panny's software and report - record a 1080p24 using seAQuake and leave it till it hits the 4gig limit and stops by itself. Bring in card to computer and use Pannys AVCcam restore utility. Tell me what happens once it's restored to your hard disk. It could be an anamolity of course.

ah this thread is always full of goodies. yummy yummy!!!

@driftwood that's like 2.5GB data for 30s duration. sounds great for a short commercial. if your GH2 passes out, see if it spits out a number. it might be "the" number from π (1998). haha. many thanks for your work.

@BenjaminDUPLAIX

Remember the UHS-I is problematic, and the 30MB/S (video hd or not) seemed more reliable.

Oh man @randolfo never mind the hack, that is awesome music. BTW the video is great! Al

Maybe the tool recreate P-frames between all the I-frames ...

@driftwood seAQuake is amazing.. It even looks good at 2x! :) Seriously though, it is insanely clean - interestingly it also shows the weaknesses of the camera (and 8 bit colour) - banding becomes more apparent in some conditions. I haven't tried to work in post with such footage yet - I guess it's easier to try and avoid banding in the shoot than to fix it in post.

Leaving for Rome tomorrow morning, will shoot as much as I can with it!

If it looks good to you, that's all that matters. ;) Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Seriously, when you know how to look for a problem, you start seeing it everywhere. All of these high bit rate patch settings deliver excellent video quality. Practical considerations become more important than squeezing out the last ounce of video quality.

@driftwood @Jspatz @balazer bkmcwd did copy from your GOP1 176mb/s patch driftwood, I was reading from his post. So that clarifies the pixel peeping part.

@driftwood THANK YOU!!!! (for both). Now if I only hadn't rented out my entire kit for this week, I could try some of these insane patches. Can't wait!

PS: Any idea if the spanning settings would work at 24L and SeAQuake at 24h with the new Ptools?

@JDN no chance of sharing between H and L settings because of the standardised frame limits for only one overall setting. sorry.