On my own experience, I would say not so sure as I am very pleased with the result I am getting out of my GH1, GH2 and now GH3. And my GH3’s video is not making a huge difference compare to what I got with the GH1 or GH2. I am still using the hacked GH1 every summer, as a copy is stored in my home country (France) and I love its color rendition compare to GH2/3. FYI, I am living and working in China since 9 years.

Every year I am shooting a short movie or an experiment with the hacked GH1. Some complained about the AVCHD format, but I never got problem in post with it as I am using Premiere CS6 on a powerful enough PC (Dell M6400). I also tested heavy color grading without problem on my GH1 footage, as you can see here on the following videos. Sorry one of the short film doesn’t get English sub yet, but I am posting a link to those video for their visual quality first, so enjoy that part. La Deuche from Hell HD (US sub Version) (there is a longer French version too)

Revolverte HD (F)

In China, I am also using my GH camera beside a Panasonic AF100, which is well known to NOT be the most exciting camera on the market (4:2:0 8 bits, AVCHD at 28MB/s, what a shame!). I had to buy an AF100 as no serious client in my field would accept to pay my usual fee (I was working with a HVX200 + Letus Ultimate prior to the AF+GH) if I were shooting with a GH2 only. After 2 jobs my AF100 got paid back and I can enjoy the use of it with my GH2 and GH3 on project now. ,

AVCHD, 4:2:0, bits… Nevertheless, I shot this Making Of video on huge project with my newly arrived AF100 and GH2 (not hacked yet). Production house, agency and client were delighted by the result. I did everything: shooting, lighting (for interview), sound recording and editing… I am a one man crew shooter (kind of MacGyver sometime) and I prefer to keep things, cheap, simple and light. CrossPolo TVC Making OF HD (US)

To keep the story short, since 2012, I had completed bunch of projects with my M43 equipment without any complain from clients (VW, Audi, French Consulate, TV Channel…) and I might invest in the GH4 if it solves the 3 main problems of the GH3: Viewfinder definition (GH3 is a nightmare compare to GH2 for manual focusing) + real video assistance (Peaking + zebra + waveform) + full time display of histogram and sound recording level while shooting.

4K or higher bit rate are not important to me as my video will NEVER be projected on a big screen and the file of the GH3 are already big enough in term of storage. Quality wise, I really like some of my GH1, GH2 or GH3 shots, and I don’t see much of a difference in term of emotion, and I think this is a more important feature for an independent filmmaker than pixel count or comparing numbers on data sheets…

You can see more of my work here: http://vimeo.com/channels/659428/videos

What I do now is I transcode the 4K footage (H264) to 4K (ProRes) and edit away on a 1080 sequence - if the delivery asks for 1080.

The problem is that once I render the sequence and decide to change some small things around or add/trim clips, I have to render again for every step that I change and overall it can be very time consuming.

Is there a way to for example transcode the 4K original footage to a 720p small files JUST FOR THE EDIT and then once the sequence is a lock, conform the clips in the sequence back to their original size (4K) and export the sequence in 1080 and 4k?

Thank you so much.

http://sourceforge.net/p/rockymountainsmovieconverter/wiki/Home/

For the rest of the January 2015 there is 30% off sale in their online store, so if you are on a PC and need DNxHD or ProRes it could be a good time to buy...

There were problems with the version 1 of the codecs but at the moment I am running the version 2 of the codecs successfully.

http://www.miraizon.com/store/store.html

Who would have thought this: the GH4 wins :-)

HQ Formats - 4:2:2

Uncompressed 4:2:2 10bit (working with LW)
ProRes 4:2:2 YUV 10bit 176Mbs HQ
DNxHD 4:2:2 YUV 10bit 176Mbs HQ
MPEG4 Wrapper for Lightworks
MPEG-2 4:2:2 I-Frame w/ M701 tag (for Lightworks only)
MPEG-2 4:2:2 I-Frame (w/out M701 tag) 



Proxy formats

ProRes 4:2:2 YUV 10bit 36Mbs
DNxHD 4:2:2 YUV 10bit 36Mbs 1080P 24
DNxHD 4:2:2 YUV 10bit 60Mbs 720P 24
DNxHD 4:2:2 YUV 10bit 145Mbs 720P 60
DNxHD 4:2:2 YUV 10bit 115Mbs 720P 50

DNxHD and ProRes HQ conversions seem nearly identical, but I think ProRes is a little better quality as a proxy format. DNxHD renders much faster than ProRes. I have a beefy workstation with Matrox hardware and it can handle all of the usable formats pretty easily but I would love to hear about how they work out for others. Please give it a try and let me know about the experience!

Check out http://hdcinematics.com/NewWeb/tools.html for more info. Also available are tools that add custom prefixes and timestamps to files on a directory-wide basis - to help keep clips uniquely named and organized (ExtensionCord). You might want to grab the Matrox and Avid codecs while you're there and download a copy of HD-MINI to audition clips on demand.

With this utility you can select a different flavor of HQ codec from proxy codec and have both conversions done automatically and off-hours. If you use ExtensionCord to add a prefix and (file creation) timestamp to your files before converting, you can edit with the proxies and then offline / link to the HQ clips of exactly the same name at render time.

I hope you can find some use for these ...; )

Cheers!

The problem is: I use a cheap i3 4GB ram to edit my avchd G6 footage with Edius, is it ridiculous to use Film-convert on ProRes BMPCC Film mode files with my hardware? I've heard that ProRes files can be used even on modest pc...

I must say that I have been very impressed by the quality of the videos i've shot so far using only the MTS files. But if transcoding the mts files will make my videos even better I would like to know.

Thanks

Has anyone done this successfully? Or at least have any good idea's on how to do this?

Neil

This is something I've never quite understood, but have always wondered. Forgive my basic knowledge here, but I've tried to research this without a specific answer as to what is going on.

When I convert from an .MTS file to ProRes422 HQ, the file get's huge. Why is that? Where is that extra data coming from if it's not there to begin with? i.e. higher bitrate. I understand the codec has a standard bitrate it will always maintain, but why do it if the original file bitrate is so much lower?

For example, a stock GH2 mts for me streams at about 22 Mbits/s, I convert it to ProRes422 HQ, that same file is now playing at 216 Mbits/s. - With no discernible image quality difference.

What is going on in the codec that makes the file so huge? Other than workflow issues, why would you want to transcode from MTS? Does converting it to ProRes (or another codec) 'Unpack' the data in a more efficient way?

Why not use something like ProRes422 LT if you're starting from a much lower data rate like a native MTS file provides?

In an AVCHD timeline in Premiere Pro CS6, I imported two clips, one the original MTS and the other a converted ProRes of that clip. But the result was not fixed by only 15 and 235 input/output adjustment, it required something closer to 40 and 215. And that did not mean that the result was the same, there was still more blue in the highlights and shadows in the MTS vs. the ProRes. Further adjustment would be needed, but the ProRes conversion was more balanced.

This was just my first test, and I'm no expert in this, but it seems like conversion to ProRes still makes sense. What are other people's take on this?

I've recently bought a Panasonic GH2 because of the great video quality once hacked (Thank you!). I never really compared the quality to the stock firmware because I hacked it right away, and started testing afterwards.

I made a extremely difficult testing set-up:

In a completely darkened room I projected thin white stripes of light on a model, and filmed it with different settings. At first I was a bit disappointed with the results, because allthough the footage looked good, a closer inspection revealed some serious flaws.

When color grading the grain in the blacks appeared very glitchy, almost like a digital rain... it seemed impossible to remove. But I was also trying out different conversion software, and by accident I noticed it made a huge difference..!

Pavtube was one of the first programs I tried, and apparently was responsible for the 'digital rain'. because ClipWrap gave a much smoother grain in the blacks..!

Watch the difference here:

Http://www.johannez.nl/oud/content/dump/testfootage-web.mov (100MB QuickTime movie, half-size but zoomed in 200% for acurate pixel size)

GH2 - hacked with Flow Motion, filmed in 24P Cinema mode @ 3200 iso (if i remeber this correctly.. is there some way to read out the meta-data and find exactly which settings were used for a particular shot?)

unfortunately I found out today about this free plug-in, which eliminates the need for conversion software. Allthough ClipWrap still seems to do a lot better coversion job then Final Cut Pro..! https://eww.pass.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/support/dload/avccam_impt/agree_e.htm

Hope this helps..!

Do you often use ProRes as a codec in your filmmaking process or when sending files to your client? Read this article made by my co-worker at Stopp, Johan Boije, about how unstable ProRes may be in terms of color and gamma shifting.

This test started out to check color fidelity with Apple ProRes and The Foundry products like Nuke and Hiero. We knew from earlier that results wouldn’t be ideal.Later we expanded the test to other video applications and encoding software to see what that would give us. The outcome was quite disturbing. A format most people believe to be stable in terms of color turns out to be not so “Pro” at all."

http://www.stopp.se/lab/?p=1621

Can somebody please post here how to download, configure, compile, and use within the terminal ffmbc to rewrap MTS files and convert to Prores/DNxHD? I am personally interested in Mac OS X but others may need this for windows also.

Thanks so much!!!

@sampledi

Welterwerk Filmkompani recently shot this short promo for Sagene, a district of Oslo, Norway. Shot exclusively on our hacked GH2. Zeiss glass! :) Time was short, and the budget was ridiculously low - but we’re quite happy with the result.

The rain-like, diagonal noise showed up in quite a few shots, but disappeared when transcoding in 5DtoRGB. Weird! Other than that, the GH2 - and the hack - performed like expected: top notch!

Enjoy! And if you haven’t already, check out Welterwerks own promo video: http://vimeo.com/welterwerk/welterwerk

Ok so I'm not running a 100 core cluster just a dual core 2012 i7 mac mini with a AMD Radeon HD 6630M / 256 MB but wow, FCPx is a lot faster on the transcoding side. I swear I benchmarked 3x for 1080p60 transcoding now it's more like 1x (one min of footage take one min to transcode to prores proxy and regular prores)!!!

Also OSX finally plays AVCHD natively even my nice 1080p60 footage at 28mbps does not stutter and it uses way way less CPU cycles.

Looks like they are finally using Open GL. (On my shite box Windows 7 laptops I've been able to play native avchd with low cpu usage for the past year so well done apple for catching up)

This is great new for us cheapskates using minis instead of Mac Pros

Can someone confirm this speed increase just in case I've been drinking too much of the Job's Kool-Aid.

Does anyone think this is possible? Does anyone want to take this project on?

Hyperdeck Shuttle/Shuttle 2/Studio/Studio Pro firmware updater for Mac:

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/detail/?os=mac&sid=3960&pid=3968&leg=false

Hyperdeck Shuttle/Shuttle 2/Studio/Studio Pro firmware updater for PC:

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/detail?os=win&sid=3960&pid=3968&leg=false

Posting this as I was able to find a 'prebuilt' binary for long suffering Mac users, that includes Prores: http://ffmpegmac.net/

I'm sure that there are 'copious' MS / Linux binaries out there...

(normally I roll my own, but I am getting lazy and want results NOW!)

Nice for delivering video in strange formats to clients in one swoop... (also means that you can delegate an extra PC for encoding jobs) if you are into Prores...

For instance, I am recording using the 100Mbps Aquamotion v2 hack, and I want to transcode to normal Prores 422, which is about 115Mbps for 1080p24. I don't want to transcode to HQ (220Mbps) or 4444 (330Mbps) if I don't have to. But am I losing quality? How much? I would rather have my file sizes be nearly half and have 98% of the quality of the hack, but I wouldn't make that sacrifice if I'm only getting 70% of the hack's capable quality. So some input from those who are more knowledgeable would be good.

Is this correct?

Aquamotion v2 100Mbps -> Appropriate Editing Codec -> Prores 422 or DNxHD 145

seaQuake 176mbs -> Appropriate Editing Codec -> Prores 422 HQ or DNxHD 220

Of course this thread should be an open discussion of different hacks and editing codecs not just relevant to me as the "Original Poster," I'm just starting things off.

-Chris