@derek What was that shot at? (lens, ISO, aperture and shutter speed)

Hmm.. I think you have a lot less noise than me at 1600 ISO - I will have to test my camera again later.

I've just ordered a C-Mount 25mm f/1.2 lens - a whole stop faster than the 1.7, so your scene above could be filmed at 800 ISO! Of course, these C-Mount lenses vignette heavily in anything other than the Ex-Tele mode.

@cbrandin yes, I am from Vienna! Nice to hear you grew up here! If you're interested about further films I did around vienna, have a look at my vimeo account. I agree about your conclusion of better rendered noise, but not necessarily more detail. The interesting part about this was also, that in completely static scenes the bitrate kept high (and the cam was stable, even with a cheap cBuffalo lass 6 card).

I am curious to see how things move on. For now I will use this settings for my trip to Italy.

@Vitaliy why some of suggested values are different from default values on the textfields? e.g. 24H's suggested bitrate is 42M where its textfield has 44M.

I don't really think that stating that there is "no huge improvement" is very helpful. Especially since there are people on this forum likening the image to Red... If there are people here that are not super excited- then maybe wait for the HDMI testing to begin, (arguably the best quality possible out of this cam). Other than that Buy a Red- or wait for Scarlet, oh- Scarlet is only 2/3 sensor! :(

At the end of the day most people are not going to be seeing that much of a difference anyway, but you will see it in the editing room. (And dare I say it when watching it in Cinema / Blu-ray etc)

It did improve. Some had said 4:2:0 subsampling caused the ugly color banding in the sky and insisted 4:2:2 subsampling via HDMI recording would fix the issue. PTools 3.62d fixed the issue with AVCHD 4:2:0.

Editing wise... I'm guessing newer PTools is producing lower compression ratio as I had easier time in editing. I used to transcode into DNxHD. Not anymore.

At this point I don't see any compelling reason to go after HDMI recording.

@nic2011 If you don't see it maybe there's something wrong with your monitor? At work I have an old one where the contrast of the screen just hides all dark areas as black. But that's where we are looking at. And it's so plain obvious that it's hard to explain ;-)

If your monitor is fine and you still don't see it, thats fine as well. Then the hack is probably not going to provide value in your chain of displaying, etc....

@nic2011 well, I am talking about the smeared macroblocks in the dark areas in 720p unhacked which also exhibit a pulsing typically for long gop codecs. In the hacked one the macroblock pulsing is gone and fine details are exhibited. Hope thats the explanation you were looking for :-)

@Zorba

No, I do not recommend changing the GOP - it has a well documented bug that Vitaliy is fixing. 44M is a good safe bitrate that does offer significant improvement over the factory settings.

The AQ parameter is important - it can have a big effect on image quality - especially in post. AQ 3 is good, AQ 4 may even be better, unless you are filming a lot of fast moving stuff.

What high AQ values do is allow the codec to encode macroblocks with more steps between dark and light. With AQ 0 you might get 20 steps between black and white, with AQ 4 you might get over 100. It's actually a little more complicated than that, but basically that's what is happening. AVC codecs actually establish a range for a macroblock (i.e. the darkest thing in the block to the lightest), and then divides that range into steps - sort of (it's pretty complicated). A high AQ value allows the codec to use more steps. Testing with high detail contrasty scenes may not show a big advantage, but low contrast scenes with gradations will, especially if they are dark. Any work you do in post will rely on the increased quality and amplify the quality, or lack thereof.

Chris

@Chris, ok! Thank you for information. I will remove the changing from GOP!
Also thank you & vitaliy for your great work to make GH2 better :)

@VK

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it is your bug - it clearly isn't. As you pointed out - it's a limitation in the GH2 codec.

Chris

@Zorba

I haven't played with 1080i much, so I'm not sure how to apply the 44M patch to it. 44M does seem like it should work with it, though.

Chris