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Beginners: Help me find specific settings topic
  • Hi, new poster here.

    Hoping someone could help me narrow down my choices among the plethora of patches on here.

    I mainly need a patch that would help me best with event capturing/running and gunning. (i.e. weddings, commercial events, concerts, etc.)

    I'm looking for:

    • Clean skin tone

    • Low-light performance

    • Reasonably sized files

    • Fluid motion

    • A decent 720p setting (for 60p slow-mo)

    • Stability

    The lens I'll be using most of the time will be the Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95.

    Also, just to put it out there. I am also interested in a patch that would work great for footage with a lot of action for a music video project.

    These are the patches I've tried out and tested so far:

    @cbrandin 44M/32M(spanning) GOP12 AQ4

    @bkmcwd 66M/50M GOP3 AQ3

    @balazer Cake 2.0

    I appreciate any help/advice from anyone. Thank you.

  • 142 Replies sorted by
  • @towi Thanks for the reply. Mind if I ask how you apply these patches to your shooting?

  • @Reshaydee

    it depends on wether or not you need spanning. cbrandin's 44M/32M AQ4 or Ralph_B's Sanity in the respective low modes will span. At least on SanDisk cards (30MB/s). Sanity provides higher IQ... IMO.

    Other than that I shoot in PAL mode ... so I can't comment on HBR/30p and/or 1080i60.

    I guess for your needs Sanity should be very good (for event capturing). For your music video project personally I would use GOP3ZILLA.

  • What about Driftwood?

  • If i wanted a setting/hack for use on a music video using a extreme pro 90MB/s in 1080 Pal 24p, which one would be best suited? im confused with all the different hacks.

    Any advise would be much appreciated

  • Depends on your personal needs and likes. Which means you need to do a lot of research and testing to find your thing. Right now I'm pretty happy with Cake2.1 in 720p60 SH mode as it's been 100% stable for me. Just upgraded to Cake2.2 and started to try 24H. Whatever you do, don't go on a job without having tested your settings for many hours in different situations...

  • Thanks Dtr

    I want a flat looking image so i can colour correct it to my taste after in post FCP, i want to get high quality+performance because i cannot afford to have stability issues while on location. high bitrate and balanced performance is a must, I will have to keep researching hacks to find the best for what i need...

  • I'm about to hack my new GH2 for the first time, I was just wondering if there are any particular patches I should be aware of out there. I'm going to be using it for short films, shooting on anamorphic lenses. I know the @Driftwood hacks are great, but which one? Sorry for the nubeness of my question. thanks in advance! And big thanks to @Vitaliy_Kiselev - You are a true legend!

  • I'm playing with sedna presets, I see there are more than one , A B C D E H, some of them crash my gh2, (I have a Trashend SDHC class10 32GB). If I just lower the bitrate from the crashing preset, can that be a solution ? Thanks

  • one more question, what is the difference between AQ1 and Q20 ?

    Thanks

  • Moved this here per VK's request.

    I would like to try use my GH2 for particle image velocimetry and was wondering if any patches discussed here would have significant advantages over stock 720p 60 fps mode

    PIV is a technique whereby fluid motion is measured by illuminating a plane with a laser light sheet and measuring the motion of particles illuminated in the plane from one frame to the next via frame to frame correlation processing on subregions of pixels (for example 16 by 16 or 32 by 32 ).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_image_velocimetry

    I need to use the 720p 60 fps mode as the 30 fps modes will allow too much motion between frames. The processing will be done on a frame by frame basis so the least interpolation possible in the video compression is desirable. Stability is also important as the clips will need to be ~ 15 minutes long to achieve adequate statistics of flow properties

    Do any of the knowledgeable people here have any reccomendations on settings or a patch that I should try for this. Thanks for any feedback,

    -Peter

  • Hi,

    I received my new GH2 (+ Sandisk 64GB 95MB/s SDXC) this week, and I intend to pimp it using your excellent patches.

    I did read the FAQs and several of the setting related topics, yet I would still like your advise on a setting that would address my use case best.

    My use case is 80% underwater videography while diving, 10% underwater photography while diving, 10% documentary video/photography on land.

    I would like to shoot video underwater mostly in 1080p30, more seldom in 720p60. If for some reason p30/p60 does not work well, I could also live with p25/p50, but "interlaced" is not an option!

    Changing between "manual video" and "P" modes is somewhat cumbersome using the underwater housing, so if possible I would like to stay in one mode, and use the trigger to take photos, and the video button to take videos. Is it possible to start taking a progressive video using the video button, or does this always require entering "manual video" mode?

    Is my assumption correct that the various patch settings do not interfere with the while balance and saturation settings one can configure for the "film mode"?

    While previewing video under water is not a requirement of mine, I would like to install a setting that does not require one to reset the camera, as "the sail fish is gone and won't come back if you missed the first opportunity to shoot it"...

    Can you recommend any particular setting given above use case?

    Thanks in advance... and by the way: Is there a possibility to donate to VK in cash? Any IBAN/BIC for a wire transfer? Or a postal address for cash-by-snail-mail? (I don't have a PayPal account and I sure don't want to open one...)

  • Do any of the settings modify or improve the HD mode? (ie 720p/30 motion JPEG)

    As a rough analogy, is HD MJPEG mode somewhat like an AVCHD all-I mode meaning it's full detail frames every frame and not doing compression based on differences compared to surrounding frames?

  • @bmcent1 "Do any of the settings modify or improve the HD mode? (ie 720p/30 motion JPEG)

    As a rough analogy, is HD MJPEG mode somewhat like an AVCHD all-I mode meaning it's full detail frames every frame and not doing compression based on differences compared to surrounding frames?"

    Yeah I would like to know this too

  • @DeShonDixon: The HD MJPEG mode looked surprisingly good to me with Mysterion settings, and the settings definitely modified this mode, as the output was 1080p, not 720p.

  • @towi I like 3 GOP patchs cause are, according to me, a good trade-off between big I frame and motion. But I like also 1 GOP patch. So did you try some patch by Driftwood? Ho do you compare it with GOP3ZILLA or GOLGOP in 24p? What do you think are pro and cons of Driftwood's and Bkmcwd's patch? I would like to know your opinion. Thank you.

  • Hi,

    first I want to thank you all for the work you're putting into this project to get the best quality out of the GH2.

    I was looking for a patch that allows me to shoot 25p with the possibility to grade the footage later on in DaVinci Resolve (after transcoding it to DPX 10bit in Premiere CS5.5). I'm only shooting narrative / commercial clips, so spanning is not necessarily needed. Also I'm shooting a lot handheld, so an INTRA codec seems to be better suited for my needs than a GOP codec.

    I'm recording to SanDisk 64GB 95MB/s cards.

    I don't want to change the hack all the time, also I don't want to use an unstable build. Which hack should I use, and which settings should I choose? As stated, picture quality and possibility to grade matter, not file size.

    Is there maybe a wiki, where all the diferent settings are explained?

    Thank you all David

  • Hi all,

    First of all, great work everyone on the patches.

    I'm looking for a patch (or multiple patches) to be used on a feature-length documentary.

    We don't care about wasting lots of hard drive space or buying 64GB SanDisk 95MB/s cards or whatever. We want the best image quality possible in each of these situations.

    One patch for talking head interviews. (Spanning especially important here) One patch for run and gun footage, some it fast motion. (Playback is important here) One patch for establishing beauty shots. One patch for available low-light work.

    Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank You

    Dan

  • Guys please help me with my last questions posted some days ago, here again: I'm playing with sedna presets, I see there are more than one , A B C D E H, some of them crash my gh2, (I have a Trashend SDHC class10 32GB).

    If I just lower the bitrate from the crashing preset, can that be a solution ?

    Or using this card instead http://www.hw1.it/sandisk-64gb-extreme-pro-sdxc-sdsdxpa-064g-x46/ref_kel/?from=kelkoo can be a solution ?

    what is the difference between AQ1 and Q20 ?

    Thanks

  • @robbie75vr, if you want to run the highest bit rate settings, I would go with the highest quality card you can get. I see a lot of recommendations for the Sandisk 64 GB in these forums.

    I don't think altering the Sedna settings to lower the bit rate will be the easy route. For one thing, the authors tune everything to be at it's best as configured, if you just drop the bit rate it'll probably have really bad results. Instead, if your card can't handle Sedna, try one of the other great settings that isn't quite as demanding: Cake, GOP3Zilla, Sanity 5, or No Adverse Effects.

  • @bmcent1 Thanks man, I will try No Adverse Effects, and if not satisfied I will buy that card linked in my prev post.

    Do you know about AQ1 vs Q20 ?

    Thanks

  • Sounds like a good plan. I've been REALLY impressed with some of the "middle of the road" bit rate hacks which are still way higher than many of the other cameras out there. Stuff between 44Mbps and 65 Mbps (IIRC) is giving me amazing video. I'm sure there is some extra little quality that can be eeked out, an someday I might need it, but for now I'm really happy with the quality and it's stable which is worth quite a bit too.

    I don't know the exact difference between AQ1 and Q20 but from reading other posts here it has something to do with the quantization tables or parameters I think. AQ might mean auto quantization and Q20 might mean selecting a different kind of quantization. Some are expected to handle situations better than others, but the highest settings can also fall back into a low quality mode if it over taxes the processor on the camera so choosing the highest setting isn't always the right solution. I may have a few things crossed up but I think that's the basic idea. We can leave that to the settings authors for now and just trust they are tuning things for the best performance and aiming for stability with high quality cards.

    One benefit of the moderate bit rate hacks that still have great quality is longer record times and burning up less of your hard drive space.

  • @bmcent1 Excellent, for me it's important to have a stable hack, I do aerial filming that cannot be repeated and I only do light grading so no need of very high bitrate, thanks for your suggestion, today I will try that patch.

  • I have yet to see any of the Quantum series Driftwood Intra settings going into fallback mode. Indeed, if you shoot with Sedna Q20 during the night on a lit subject like a face, the bitrate required will drop accordingly to around 60Mbps for example - but take my word this is still top quality. As soon as the detail creeps up more bitrate is consumed. Whereas AQ1 will push the bitrate to a more constant level. :-)