Hi PV,

I'm having some issue's with the Aquamotion V2 footage playing back on my rig. I am fairly sure it is an issue with playing the high bitrate footage on my Mac, but am only experiencing it with one of the sample videos i have taken, the other videos playback flawlessly. The troublesome footage plays fine until it freezes at about 0:40 and flashes full frame green with other strange video glitches. The data for the video appears to be damaged, scrubbing through the footage does not show a preview frame for a large part of the video file.

Thing is, playback is fine on the camera, no issue whatsoever. When viewing on my mac i have copied the footage to my HDD and have tested it in VLC and Quicktime (with the Panasonic .mts plugin). The footage even managed to crash VLC, but i am experiencing no lag in any other test videos with this patch.

It would put my mind at rest if someone could explain this, i need a stable patch and would hate for this to be an issue after a long shoot. If it's an issue with my machine and not the footage then i have no problem!

PS, the footage is superb!

@twistedtape It sounds like that particular recording is corrupted. Try the panasonic recovery tools mentioned earlier in this thread.

@balazer Re: L setting. It depends how low you go. Many of the tests in the past have produced underuns on the L setting because in general everything is set for the H setting. Test away and see how low you can go and with that sort of quality you get on the i frames. Of course, there will be a lot of wastage in quality because of the shared setting. If it works for you - let me know. And of course they will span and record a picture. Analyse the pictures to see if it maintains quality. Watch for cadence issues.

always copy the whole private folder over to your hard disk - thats what you need, you can always remove mts files which arent needed later.

Just a quick question. Hopefully someone can help me out. I'm looking into an external audio recorder right now, tascam dr-07, as I am on a really tight budget. I was told by someone that the AC3 compression hack in ptools makes it so that an external recorder isn't needed. I will be using it along with a rode videomic. So just wondering, does the AC3 compression settings at 448000bps make an external recorder such as the tascam dr-07 unnecessary? Thanks in advance.

@sanzadez, you need an external recorder. As @stevgol correctly points out, external monitoring is essential. Also, you really want 24 bit sample depth (not the 14 bit of the gh2). The audio hacks are nice, especially for providing better emergency backup sound (which can happen anytime -- believe it or not, we've even had sound get corrupted once on a freaking alexa and had to pull from the gh2 with a small shotgun on it); but it should never be you primary source. DR-40 is a pretty decent budget recorder, only drawback over dr 100/zoom is that you can't individually adjust input levels but that's not a bit deal if you're eventually planning to run a shotgun / lav setup seeing as most lavs will allow you to adjust their levels after you've dialed in the shotgun. $200 online.

Generally, buy the best gear you can afford and buy it once. You'll never regret it. Make sure if you can possibly afford it that it has balanced xlr inputs; you'll eventually add a "real" microphone to the kit, and if it doesn't have these, you'll have to buy a new recorder too.

@traumManufaktur thanks again for your help.
after trying, testing and reading a lot, I can almost conclude the problem is with my FCP. I'll have the installer in about 2 weeks and after re-installing will try log&transfer again. I am positive it will work fine.
Yes, meanwhile I have been using clipwrap trial- as most of my footage has been shorter than a minute and I am policing myself to shoot shortlenght shots-which is a kind of ridiculous but pratical situation for the upcoming weeks.

I'll still badly need media converter for the longer footages - As it won't be a direct transfer, can I assume I'll loose some quality on the process? (I'll test it tonight) - What codec would be most appropriated? H264?

5DtoRGB is working fine, I just didn't find a way to use it as a normal converter instead of a program to flatten the image. I'll be using footage almost straight from camera. I am not sure whether it would be better using 5DtoRGB once I'll be trying to reach something similar to my .mts files - allthough I may use it as a last solution.

Thanks for helping! Really appreciate it.

p.s: anyone aware of other programs with free trials? Pavtube and other programs I tried are terrible and transcode the footage with their logo in the middle. haha, disapointing!

Hi,

Just bought GH2 and have a question.

Can I set the EVF to behave in stills mode in the same way as in the movie mode? By that I mean, I would really prefer a darker image (like in movie mode) in EVF, than brighter and slower (as it is now in stills mode) for low-light situations.

Thanks.

Why do so many prefer Lumix 14mm f2.5 instead of Lumix 20mm f1.7? I thought that bigger aperture hole is always better.

There's a big difference between 14mm and 20mm on mFT.

micro four thirds!

@ttancredi 5DtoRGB messes with gammas so don't use it if you can avoid it. +1 on clipwrap. Log and Transfer screws up because sometimes I find that for whatever reason one of the metadata files (found in those gazillion other folders) fails to write and FCP can't square it away. So clipwrap to prores if you can.

Just read through the entire 10 pages of this topic 2 am saturday morning.