88Mbps GOP3 AQ3 didn't pass my bush of death test. As Vitaliy suggested, I'm going to double the GOP size. Hopefully the higher B-frame bitsize does the trick. That would be GOP6 for 24p and GOP12 for 60p.

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!

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.

thank you

Wow - it looks like 66M might become the new "conservative settings". Quite a departure from just a couple of days ago!

Chris

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.

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)?

88mb seems stable with most of my class 10 cards at 1080p 24, 1080p30 gets the motion recording error.

thanks for the hard work VK !. Chris thanks for the settings. Are the settings provided by Chris suppose playback in camera with no issues?

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.

@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.

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.