Since there seems to be some demand for settings that combine Timebuster 2 + Cake 2.x, I'm willing to tailor a branch that is the best merger for both. For this I need to relax some of Timebuster's main goals, so I need those that are interested to answer a few questions:

• Are you ready to sacrifice absolute control over IQ (either down for reaching 24h or up to get better IQ) and can you settle for the default quantizer parameter =20?

• Must you use a 360º shutter (and therefore use HBR) or you don't mind about it and prefer to sacrifice 24p instead?

VBR patches like Cake are already good approaches to timelapsing and all the better if they have a long GOP nature, because the temporal redundancy raises it's efficiency to a whole new level. What a specifically tailored settings definition can achieve in case of pure Cake, is a ~2.5x recording length when very low (1/2s - 1/2.5s) shutter speeds are used. And this achievement is mainly due to adjusting the GOP length.

@mrttt Yes, and that's a puzzle to me. I'll have to check if I threw in any post filters when I did the edit... I might have done some color correction. What's the timecode where you see this?

What really puzzled me is that Cake 2.0 delivers 205 Mbps... I never expected that, although I know that water motion really increases the complexity of the visual field.

Cake 2.3 beta 1:

• Improved rate control in 24H

Cake 2.3 timelapser 1:

• HBR 30p (NTSC) mode optimized for low bit rates with slow shutter speeds

• 1/2.5 s shutter recommended

• Approximately 6 Mbps

• 30i is unusable; other modes are the same as Cake 2.3b1

In Cake 2.3 beta 1 I've tried to keep the 24H average bit rate as close as I could to how it was set before, while keeping the max below my safe level and correcting the problem of the encoder going into fallback mode on some high detail, low motion scenes. Please test. If there are no problems, this version will become 2.3 final. With any luck, this will be my last update to Cake. We should all spend more time shooting and less time testing.

I'm sure there are scenes in nature that can still cause the encoder with these settings to go into fallback mode, but they won't be very common. I could create settings that never go into fallback mode, but that would force me to be more conservative about how I set the bit rate. My goal was always to get the bit rate as high as I could while still having near 100% reliability and spanning. If a rare detailed scene raises the bit rate enough to force the encoder into fallback mode, that's a good thing: it means you won't get a recording error or a spanning failure.

Cake 2.3 timelapser 1 is a tiny experiment for people who want super long recording times. The average user will be better off using regular Cake in VMM 300% mode, which is stable and gives higher quality. Timelapser 1 uses one half to one third the bit rate of VMM 300% 24H. I did not test spanning in timelapser 1. At this bit rate, you'll get about 90 minutes of recording before you reach 4 GB. If Duartix or anyone else wants to take over this line of development, be my guest.

Edit: please see 2.3 beta 2, here: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/2123/gh2-cake-v2.2-reliability-and-spanning-in-720p-hbr-24p-and-vmm-at-2-2.5x-stock-bit-rates#Item_380

@balazer great stuff, will try out cake 2.3 tomorrow morning, thanks a lot balazer. I agree, time to stop testing new settings/patches and get out shooting. Your settings mean this to me: stable and spanning settings for all shooting modes in middle/high bitrates - thats it. Cheers

There is no HBR 24p. HBR is 25p or 30p. 24P Cinema is 24p. http://www.personal-view.com/faqs/gh2-usage/gh2-usage

@balazer and @duartix thank you very much for your great work with Cake and Timelapser.

Sorry for my non-scientific approach to this, but since it's not an option for me to develope Cake+timelapser further, I'd like to give my opinion on how I think it should work. HBR30p is the best option for timelapse-mode, because 24p is way too valuable to waste. 2fps would be better in a long run instead of 2,5fps if it saves space, but quality is more important. If 2,5fps works better I can deal with it. 60min to 90min / 4GB would be enough for file-size efficiency. Spanning with standard Sandisk Extreme Class 10 30MB/s is also vital for extreme timelapses.

I'm not sure if it is possible to develope HBR30p-timelapse completely separated from 24p, but the quality of 24p shouldn't be not compromised. However the frame quality of timelapser should be as close to the quality of 24p as possible. Combining clips shot using both modes shouldn't cause too much variation in quality for the best viewing experience. Is it even possible to achieve timelapse-mode that is as good quality as 24p without massive file-sizes?

@vstardust

Your opinion, as well as other's willing to drop in, is highly appreciated.

Personally, I also believe that HBR30 is the best option for timelapsing not only because it's more independent from 24p (HBR25 shares the same GOP) but mainly because it gives access to a great range of 360º shutter angles: http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/2396/gh2-motion-fluidity-360%C2%BA-shutter-test-on-slow-shutter-speeds That is the reason why I endorse 2.5fps instead of 2fps.

Plain vanilla Cake is already excellent at this and if you don't need the extra recording length, I recommend on using it as it is, because it's pretty well suited for 2.5fps, 5fps and 10fps. It just needs a few extra GOP tweaks to achieve longer Recording Length. Tweaking for 2.5fps would give ~30% of the current bitrate (~3.3x the recording length) and for 5fps it would give ~53% of the current bitrate (~1,9x the recording length). For vanilla Cake right now I'm predicting ~18m = 4GB @2.5fps.

Now, addressing some of your questions:

• Spanning problems and timelapsing don't make any sense when used in the same sentence.

• Timelapsing @ 2.5fps uses 4x-8x less bitrate than normal footage with the same IQ. What do you call massive?

The quality difference between 24p and HBR depends on what you are shooting. Usually the difference in quality is not large. (i.e., they both have good quality)

@vstardust : I'm still struggling to figure out if you need some tailored settings. How big is your bigger card and how long do you need to record? How much x do you want to speed up the video?

@duartix I have 16GB cards ~ about 6 hour max with 7Mbps. I still have to study timelapses and nature to figure out what I really need. What I do know is that I like long smooth timelapses of sunsets, wandering shadows and that kind of stuff - 1-3 hours shrinked to 15-30 secs. As I have said before I'm going to take about 5 month trip and because I want to travel light I'm not going to take a computer with me, but only one 1TB external hard drive. There ain't going to be fast internet access to where I'm going and that's why I want to keep the file sizes small. I'll get back to you if I have need for more tailored settings. Thanks though.

I'll be trying cake 2.3. Just loaded it, did a few clips so far and averaged 44mbps. Still seems sharp and of quality to me. I had been using mysteron but I feel like the 100mbps is wasteful for card space.

@Bueller Yes, it took a hell of a long time, but Youtube accepted it. According to what I've read, Youtube suggests 8 Mbps for 1080p (http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/static.py?hl=en&topic=1728588&guide=1728585&page=guide.cs) but also will accept higher.

I checked the average download speed for Youtube for my area: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed shows an average download speed of 8 Mbps.

Just for fun, I used the Firefox download helper to download the HBR version of my video, and checked the speed of the resulting MP4 file. The result was 257 MB in size, with a total bit rate of 6.1 Mbps.

Bottom line: it's probably a waste of your time to upload any 1080p video to Youtube with more than 8 Mbps stream, and likely we're fooling ourselves that high bit rate makes a difference for Youtube playback -- but I could be wrong.