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Flow Motion v2 vs. Moon Trial 5 opinions. Please?
  • geist878geist878

    Hello,

    I'm a film student in my last year and I am doing my senior projects. I have a GH2 that I hacked with the Moon Trail 5 settings after asking some classmates and doing some research. And I am very happy with how my projects are coming out with Moon, but I have this nagging feeling that I didn't do the right thing. Now I've done some more research and a lot of people have been using Flow Motion v2. There doesn't seem to be anything out there directly comparing the two. And because of my ignorance of the terminology used when talking about the hacks, I can't figure it out for myself.

    So now I am asking for some opinions about the two hacks compared to one-another. What are they good at? What are they bad at? Which one is the best bet if you want to make films and not do a ton of color grading?

    Thanks for reading all that.

  • 29 Replies sorted by
  • peternappeternap

    My humble opinion is that they can't be compared. Apples to Oranges. Moon is very, very good as are most of Nick's settings. They are geared for more specific shooting situations though.

    Flow Motion is also very good but more forgiving (Again IMO) and better suited for general applications.

    720-60 which is the Achilles Heel of the GH2, seems better with Flow Motion thus better for outdoor sports.

    I think a better comparison would be Sanity Vs Flow Motion.

  • geist878geist878

    Forgive my ignorance again but,

    1.I heard (read) that a lot about Driftwood's settings but I have not able to figure out which one the best for my situation.

    1. When you say "720-60", what are you referring to?

    Edit: I am having some weird formatting issues here.

  • nacnac

    I have been using Flowmotion on my GH2 since Jan, and its been rock solid. I tried a few other hacks now and then but they were all too buggy, and IMHO I didn't really see any improvements over Flowmotion. Moon was no good for me, as it saved corrupted metadata in the files and FCPX refused to load them. So if you want a really stable hack I would recommend FM.

  • vicharrisvicharris

    @geist878 Forgive me if this sounds rude but you say you're in your last year as a film student right? You've never heard of the numbers 720-60 in a sentence or in school at all?

  • geist878geist878

    No, you don't sound rude at all. I go to an Art Institute, they can't decide what to teach half the time(Between very basic video production and very basic filmmaking.) So we never get really deep into anything technical. Most of that stuff I know about filmmaking I had to teach myself which leads to times like this when I find I have a huge hole in what seems to be common knowledge. :( Sorry folks, trying really hard to learn this stuff.

    Thanks Petenap and nac. You too vicharris.

  • peternappeternap

    @geist878 1280X720...60 FPS. (Resolution and frames per second)

  • geist878geist878

    @peternap Thanks. Now I get it. I've never seen that phased that way before... Now I feel a jackass...

  • DrDaveDrDave

    As a basic rule of thumb, anything about cutting edge tech in school will be A; wrong B: out of date. The classic example is physics classes at the University level that were taught without mentioning quantum mechanics, to name one of the most unbelievable examples. As far as "tech for the arts" goes, it is even more of a soggy state.

    As far as which hack to use, try them out and use the one you like the best. If you don't want to try them out, it doesn't matter which one you use since you won't know which one you like the best.

  • geist878geist878

    ...It's not that I'm not going to try them out.(I'm going to do that this weekend in fact) I don't have a lot of experience with this and I just asking for some advice going in. That's it.

  • peternappeternap

    @geist878 Trying them can get to be an obsession. I love trying them and switch constantly. As I said earlier, Nick's settings can be spectacular. Some very low noise, some extreme detail wide others extreme detail close....on and on. Sometimes I go out with a dozen cards, all with different settings.

    Other times, especially shooting around water, I'll just take Flow Motion. It's really good in areas with some water vapor in the atmosphere.

    Concerts, run and gun lectures and such....Sanity which has great detail, spans without fuss and is just good all around.

    Good luck and have fun!

  • DrDaveDrDave

    I've rarely had an issue with flowmotion, it's a good one to start with and you can use the lower bitrate setting if you need longer recordings. You should certainly AB Nick's patch and see which you like.

  • JuMoJuMo

    I LOVE to use Moon when I need the extra flexibility in grading and want some of that beautiful grain like noise (I can push Moon noticeably further in post than any other patch), but Flow Motion v2 is amazing for anything with movement, action, or potentially some general purpose stuff. To be honest, I leave Moon T5 on almost all the time (often with magenta shifted up one notch on my WB), and I use Flow Motion V2 when appropriate or sometimes Sedna (which replaced Cake for me with it's reliable spanning and relatively moderate data rates).

  • tetakpataktetakpatak

    @JuMo interesting...and I've been using the Cake frequently since longer than one year for its spanning was just always working in 24p1080. Note: always used Sandisk 64GB, for a price that I sometimes had to live with the known "file # limit exceeded" issue of that otherwise great card.

  • mrbillmrbill

    I've been using Flowmotion 2.02 with one of the 64gb cards and it's been rock solid. I have to use 25p HBR for all my projects, and it looks great. Maybe it's heresy, but I've found there isn't a massive difference between many of the patches if you're shooting HBR, and as all my stuff is for paying clients, reliability was also a big factor - Flowmotion delivers on both picture quality and stability. My 02

  • JuMoJuMo

    @tetakpatak A few months back I used Cake for an all day TED event and it was great (event was 10 hours or so). Not a single issue on multiple GH2's. I haven't personally run Sedna through the ringer in a situation as demanding as that, but from what I hear of others using it at events, it sounds like it should stack up to Cake in terms of extreme reliability, and I do prefer the image of Sedna to Cake, which suffers a little more in the dark areas IMO.

    @mrbill I would agree with you that Flowmotion is more rock solid (as you put it) compared to Moon (T5 is what I have most experience with), Moon T5 will very occasionally stop a clip recording (though it's only happened to me a few times in months of use). I will say though, if you do any type of post on your footage, Moon T5 still bests Flowmotion in terms of flexibility and in my opinion, image quality. For flexibility testing, just try the good old saturation test (but do yourself a favour, and DON'T test that in an 8 bit environment, use 16 bit environment at minimum to truly see how far you can push it).

  • JuMoJuMo

    Oh, and if you're editing in a Mac environment, make sure to take into account the AVCHD bug and remap your black and white output levels from 0-255 to 16-235 to get the full dynamic range of the camera.

  • BurnetRhoadesBurnetRhoades

    @JuMo what bug is that? That sounds more like an application error or user error. I get no such mis-mapping of levels. I also properly transcode my MTS to ProRes to account for the Main Concept bug that introduces artifacts into AVCHD footage in any tool that uses their libraries.

    You should also be working in full 32bit floating point, not 16bit, if you're going to "push it".

  • JuMoJuMo

    @BurnetRhoades Yes you're right, 32bit floating point is definitely best, 16bit minimum was implying that more is better. If you have the juice to go 32bit floating point, use it by all means. Though I will say to many of those out there using 8bit, moving to 16bit is a huge leap in footage flexibility if your system can't handle 32bit.

    Re: the AVCHD bug - it turns out it's a QuickTime problem, but QT is at the core of a lot of apps and NLEs on a Mac (even a lot of transcoding software). The article below from EOSHD will explain the bug a bit more and why the fix is important. If you are on a Mac and haven't heard of this, try it out and maybe you'll see what you've been missing. If you use 5DtoRGB to transcode, you're okay, it automatically remaps the Rec.709 portion of a 601 space. Or if you do your transcoding on a PC you're probably ok too.

    The article: http://www.eoshd.com/content/8612/mac-avchd-gamma-issues-the-fix

    This did just get a little off topic, sorry guys!

  • BurnetRhoadesBurnetRhoades

    Odds are if a person's system can't handle 32bit it can't handle editing AVCHD, not directly. Grading isn't about realtime performance anyway so system requirements really aren't steep. Five and six year old systems with 4GB are just fine.

    I recall that article now but there was a lot of confusion in there, much of it having to do with assumptions that all AVCHD sources were the same or the same range. Transcoding prior to grading with something like 5DtoRGB does simplify things while ballooning the footage of course but it's a necessary evil for CS users so long as Main Concept's libraries are buggy and Adobe links to those.

  • JuMoJuMo

    Yeah, admittedly EOSHD is not the Times and they may not fully understand what is really going on, but what I do know for sure is when I do it on my Gh2 footage, the highlight rolloff is noticeably better and it reaches deeper shadow detail (I also transcode to ProRes444 or 422HQ before doing any work with the footage). The change in dynamic range noticeably flattens the image, which you may or may not be interested in, but people should consider trying it at least once to see.

  • mrbillmrbill

    What 16 bit system are you grading/editing on?

  • anthonywanthonyw

    I'm trying to decide between these two myself at the moment... so I just did a test.

    Can you spot any differences?

    Flow Motion V2

    Moon T5

  • vicharrisvicharris

    Dude, I don't know what you did with that Moon footage but I have never seen Moon look like that. It doesn't even look like you had it focused right. Something went terribly wrong.

  • anthonywanthonyw

    It might be because the HD version is still being processed by Vimeo?

  • vicharrisvicharris

    Ahhhh, It didn't say it was still processing but I'll look again.

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