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AVCHD: Extreme settings
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  • @allenswrench

    well... that's pretty cool!

    Chris
  • @allenswrench are these higher rates capable of bricking a camera? or only of crashing it? (If it won't brick, I'll give them a try too. I don't care about crashes as long as it doesn't do permanent damage.)
  • For the card getting hot, it should not have been more the case with the 100+ megabits mjpeg birate that have been in use for quite some time. Or did no one made the remark before.
  • Video Bitrate 24H: 154000000 (after raising it from 42 to 66 to 85 to 110)
    Auto Quantizer for 1080: 4
    GOP: 3

    This is working for me. I took 10 shots some with motion, some not. The files are true to the bitrate (about 15 MB per second). The only failure I had was when raising the iso to 3200. I got the motion-image-can't-be-captured error (sorry I forgot the wording).

    VLC stutters when playing them on my mac. I'm using Voltaic to convert to quicktime. This hack really is amazing. Instead of macroblocking in the shadows it's starting to look like grain which is great. Banding is also drastically reduced. I'm curious about the limits now.

    Oh, I'm using a Sandisk Extreme SD.
  • @vvvfmoron Is it banding noise or banding like in sky gradient?
  • @danyyel Like sky gradient. It's something that I personally am always looking for even though I doubt most people care. I usually see it when shooting a plain white wall that's lit indirectly. The transition from darker shades to lighter has gradients.

    Does anyone know if there's a chance at this ever going away completely? I'm grateful for where it is now, just asking.

  • That is very good news, because gh2 did show quite some banding to my taste on flat gradient like the sky. Some speculated that it seemed more than other dslr. I don't think we will ever get rid of it until we get 10bit codec.
  • Banding is probably where the encoder bitrate drops on the lesser detail. Check out streameye and watch what happens to the data on Sky /lesser detail shots. Playing with picture profiles and noise refuction (NR-2, etc...) can help but a large part of it is down to 8 bit colour and the GH2's poorish low light capabilities. Do some exposure setting tests with the lenses you choose - and filters if used.
  • I may have spoke too soon about the 154mbps setting. For my purposes it works great but I went outside and shot foliage and did some whip pans to stress it and was able to produce the motion capture error. I also tried 176mbps and while it works for static shots, it failed on moving foliage. 198mbps locked up the camera until I rebooted.
  • thanks for the hard work VK !. Chris thanks for the settings. Are the settings provided by Chris suppose playback in camera with no issues?
  • A "Banding Minimizer" patch with picture profile suggestions would be most welcomed. Is banding more apparent with AVCHD or MJPEG?
  • 88mb seems stable with most of my class 10 cards at 1080p 24, 1080p30 gets the motion recording error.
  • FWIW the sky banding issue is minimized at 88mbps. The grain and detail looks excellent at high ISOs. Though it's set to 88 mbps the actual footage liks to hover between 86-107 mbps.

    Someone correct me if I'm wrong....but isn't this now in AVC-Intra territory?
  • How does one achieve high bit-rate 1080/30P ? Is it as simple as changing the "24" references in the patches to "30"? And will that render actual 30fps (not desired) or 29.97 (desired)?
  • @a10tive1
    There is a patch in the experimental section for changing 1080i60 to 1080p30, but it doesn't work. Too bad, I also would like to have decent 1080p30.

    For now, I get 1080p30 by shooting with the 80% variable frame rate and conforming to 30 fps in Final Cut. The picture looks very good. The big disadvantage is that there is no sound when shooting in this mode.

  • I tried 4x default settings including 24L bitrate.

    Simply amazing. It took only 1 GOP cycle (4 frames for GOP3) to stabilize the bitrate. In low lighting (-2 EV) and not complex scene, the bitrate stayed around 80Mbps!!!! Definitely higher B-frame bitrate than previous patch.

    Awesome shadow detail. Occasional playback issue. Not a showstopper. Just browse prev next. Then it played fine.
    setc.ini.zip
    762B
    test1.jpg
    1194 x 200 - 86K
  • @stonebat you mind sharing other settings you changed inside ptool, or maybe provide the patch file,thanks
  • Wow - it looks like 66M might become the new "conservative settings". Quite a departure from just a couple of days ago!

    Chris
  • @sammy just uploaded the setting.
  • thank you
  • @cbrandin Yeap. Double digit is the new conservative. Awesome job, Chris and Vitaliy.
  • We've been fiddling all day and have settled on 110000000 for vid bitrate 24H and ADD, and GOP 6. Why 6? Well, 1 was fun, but the encoder with complicated scenes was falling apart, it turned out. And 6, when tested against an identical scene looked better than 3 (this test was for noise character in low lit shadows... our biggest concern). That all said, the 600 500 400 300 mjpeg at 1080, other than for pixel-peeping detail is also blowing our minds.... but at the end of the day, the mjpeg is impressing more at lower ISO settings than at higher. At higher, the 24h setting seems stronger.
  • @cosimo_bullo mind sharing the setting file? thanks
  • just a very quick test using stonebat's settings (88m). apart from not being able to play in camera (transcend 10 card), everything looks amazing, shadow detail, grain, etc. However, I noticed a strange hiccup when using window media player classic for preview. when focusing at a detailed carpet;) some nasty blocking appeared. It didn't show up in VLC or Premiere, so it probably is WMP's issue. Anyway, I attached screengrabs from WMP, Premiere and Streamparser. Thanks!
    wmp.jpg
    1883 x 1053 - 249K
    premiere.jpg
    1727 x 968 - 247K
    sp.png
    1266 x 622 - 40K