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AVCHD: Stable settings
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  • Butt: I agree wholeheartedly. 720p50 with B-frames enabled is a joy. It's a pity you need to shoot 1080p24 first every time you want to shoot 720p with B-frames.

    If this can be fixed, I would shoot 720p50 all day long. With B-frames and stock GOP, it's rock-stable at 45Mbit and probably delivers better quality than those "more bitrate is better, let's lower the GOP"-patches.

    So Vitaliy please please, can you take a look at what needs to be initialized so we don't need to do the "1080p-dance" before shooting B-frames 720p?

    Thanx!
  • I'll translate my message - Yup... Why did you write almost everything in German?

    @Butt

    Did you know I spoke German, or was this a translator fail? If you did know, how?

    Chris

    I just noticed... His text is a translation of a question I asked him earlier in english.
  • In effetti questa è la verità.
  • @Butt

    I test your 720p in 60fps with sundisk card extreme pro 45MBs 32Gb at 3200 ISO and write failure occur after a few second, hard crash, first take after format ok, the second take was in 1080i 24H after than in 720p crash every take, so no possibility to have different resolution on the same card.
    ETC mode crash too.
  • @cbradin
    Is not possible to look the clip in .mts on a mac in correct way, on a PC are all fluid with media player but on mac are Scheiße stutter with every player.
    We need a codec for quicktime like media player.
    At the moment i convert the .mts with clipwrap but the stutter occur the same.
  • Please help me to understand the graph in StreamParser below. Why graph is high in the begining and low after that.
    Settings are 42mbs for all high and 35mbs for all low. Please see attached files. The recording is stable in all the modes though. There is no blip that I can see.
    setf.zip
    444B
    1080i60_42mbs.JPG
    1208 x 547 - 138K
    1080i60_42mbs_mediainfo.JPG
    696 x 504 - 62K
  • @Ulisse
    There are tons of "fluid" players, MPlayer comes to mind. Roxio Video Player that comes with Toast is fast and light. Of course you can rewrap with clipwrap and view in quicktime.
    VLC works for the most part, but you may need to adjust the buffer and interlacing depending on the clip your playing.
    Yes, Quicktime dosent support .mts which is a pain But if your having issues with the smoothness of playing the clips... it could be another factor, cause my iMac i5 '11 and iMac i3 '09 play everything fine.
  • You just tell the things why i use PC, but this is for AVCHD: Stable settings.
    Pleace post stable settings here and make your own Mac topic.
  • @Dusty42

    Could be because you are overdoing it and using too low of a GOP? Could be because you changed other settings that were not necessary to change? Why don't you simply change the bit rates to 42 and 35, change GOP to 12 for everything and then play with the new Quant settings in Patches for end users section.

    It is much better to start simple and methodically work your way through the other settings if you are really interested in finding out what is best.
  • @cbrandin
    sorry for german translator error: see you:

    >I was thinking about something and I wanted your opinion. A common use for 720p is slow-motion. It seems to me that if you have gotten 720p with B frames stable, there might be an additional thing to try; that is, setting the 720p GOP to 12. My theory is that if B frames are used, and the GOP is set to 12, you end up with footage that would blend very well with 24H footage. Does this make sense to you?<

    Yes, that's my intention
    it makes sense!
  • a new Setting @cbrandin 1080p/ @Butt 720p B-Frames GOP12
    sete.zip
    444B
  • @Butt

    Those settings look pretty good!

    Chris
  • @cbrandin
    yes - I also think
    i must do more tests for 720p (to time stable 90%)
  • The GOP 12 for the 720p might work OK. Big problems only seem to come up with very short GOP's (6, or less). I'm not sure about how it will work with B frames. I can think of reasons it might fail, and also reasons it might work perfectly. I look forward to hearing about your test results.

    Chris
  • @Butt

    Another thing you might want to try. Set the 720p Quantization tables T1-T4 to the 1080p tables T1-T4. That will make the quantization matrices the same. The footage might blend better with 1080p.

    In the previous message I meant to say that testing the combination of GOP 12 and B frames with 720p would be an interesting test. I think that's what you've done.

    Chris
  • Had a social tonight and shot with Butts 2nd version settings on 20 1.7 + generic anamorphic + Tokina 72 0.4 - never had so much fun - surrounded by editors directors, facility owners of the highest lvl, all having used Af101 extensively as the lowest cam theyd accpept of course! , and all to a point interested in what you lovely guys are doing to the GH2 - as it was I was there with Butts lovely stable No2 setting loaded, had 12 hours of chat, expectation and plain pointing the bare cam (no extra EVF, LCDVF etc) at em and the late London sun, most of them own a 5D+7D and as my runt circulated and the questions were asked - people who actually make shit (as in as we ramble on in forums these guys actually make shit ) loved it, funny night ! Hey I know nowt, just point shootand chop, Im a sound engineer by day - that end I DO know but I receive edits daily with footage that I think .... really! For broadcast with no ADR budget or conception - last year had to deploy CEDAR as a plugin, and most dials I receive these days are terminal, sadly never in my youth would that be as we rotated from Boom swinging to FIsher Boom to recording to Track-laying to mixing - never let your fellow down. Saddest (eternal) problem is be it TV or film or project - no-one leaves the theatre whistling a two shot - record sound well on location - the turd can be fixed (ish) but boy it's far more expensive than actually having a real crew!
  • From what I see, yet there 's no real stable adjustable .. right? ;-(
  • Has anyone a stable setting for longtime recordings over 10-15 minutes? I did a test with several hack settings around 42Mbps-44Mbps with my new Card "SanDisk Extreme Pro SD 16GB (45MB/s)". It's always the same. When the recorded file reaches 4.29GB, the cam normally would save a new file that would again record up to 4.29 GB ... and so on until the card is full. BUT the record stops! The cam can't play back the corrupted file and Final Cut doesn't recognize the SD-Card as a camera any more to import the file. The conversion-programm VoltaicHD is able to open the "damaged" file to convert it into a MOV. With Ptools v3.61d it was working quite well but the "blip" at the beginning of each file was there. Now the blip is gone but I can't record longer films. Thank you very much for any suggestions!!! I have a PAL-Version and different highspeed-cards.
  • @larsolite
    I had the same experience shooting an interview with a hacked (3.61) GH2. In my case the interview spilled over into a 2nd file after 4.29GB, but neither file was readable by FCPX, nor even recognized as being on the card. I tried to recover the file by manually copying and re-wrapping using Rewrap>m4v but without success.
  • I've also been having problems with spanning 24H when hacked with ptool 3.62. I had a shot that failed to span (camera just stopped recording) at 44mbit, so i went down to 36 mbit, which apparently was on the edge and spanned across two files, but when it went to create the third (during which time there was more motion in the shot) if failed and stopped recording. I then tried shooting for a long time at 28mbit (my 24L setting) and it spanned fine until the rest of my 32GB card was filled up. So it seems that maybe high bitrates don't span well with ptool 3.62.

    My settings had 720p and 1080p24 Frame Buffers (FB) doubled, all 3 Frame Limits doubled and AQ to 3 - Most to details for both 1080 and 720.

    I'm using a patriot LX series class 10 SDHC card, which is not the fastest in the business. When i benchmark it, write hovers around 19MB/sec, but drops down to 13 for a small bit of time regularly a couple times a second - meaning probably there is a stoppage of writing every once in a while on the card and maybe this is causing the spanning and/or 720p randomly dying on complex scenes issues I'm having at anything over 32mbits/sec for 720p60.

    I have not tried importing anything into FCP (i only have FCE actually) but ffmpeg has never had a problem with re-wrapping any of these spanned clips into .mov files (using Media Converter - a free ffmpeg GUI).

    I plan on testing spanning more today, esp. if i can get my DC coupler working with a power supply i have here. Spanning properly is really important to me.
  • @Butt

    I like your 720p setting but we need only a dedicated card for this if you take a 1080 clip and than go back to 720p freeze body occur.
  • So far today I can't get any 24H setting to span across files. Have tried 44, 36 and 32 mbit/sec with and without frame buffer/frame limit doubling and with and without AQ.
    I can get 720p60 (SH) to span across files fine at 32mbit/sec with only the bitrate patches checked - have not tried in other modes.
  • @bdegazio & @arvidtp
    Thank you for your replies!!! I will keep on shooting up to 10 minutes with this beautiful hack. When it comes to really long recordings I will have an extra SD-Card with the unhacked firmware in my photobag. It takes about 5 minutes to get back, if I need a looong shot. I love the hack! And I will post a film that I shot today within a few days. Thanks for the help and the hack :-)))
  • Unfortunately, @larsolite, a "really long recording" can be a simple interview. It's difficult to consider a hack that limits a take to 10 minutes as "stable". It would appear that the current hack is giving the GH2 a similar take limit as the 5D. Let's hope the next PTool version overcomes this limit.
  • Yeah - I tested more and can't get anything 32mbits or over to span with ptool 3.62. Tomorrow I'll revert back to my stable settings from ptool 3.61 and test spanning on those - I remember it working. Shame because ptool 3.62 output looks really nice at even at 44mbits…

    Also annoying that spanning, but its very nature takes so long to test!