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Official Low GOP topic, series 4
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  • @Sage Premiere Pro sucks big time. It always did. I don't get the marketing hype. In terms of usability, it is one of the crappiest programs adobe has created. Bad icons, lots of wasted space everywhere, half of the programs functions can't be assigned to keyboard shortcuts, many keyboard shortcuts don't do what you expect them to do, when importing footage, you cannot see clips, you can't import & copy clips to a set location, there is no OpenCL acceleration on modern day iMac's en MacBooks, DynamicLink fails half of the time... I don't see what's good. Everyone hated Premiere until FCPX and now suddenly it is great... I don't get it. People used to laugh at you when you used Premiere and now it is amazing and nobody complains anymore. Very strange.

    I like Avid 6 much better... to me that is FCP 8 64-bit. FCPX is nice but has a long way to go.

  • Absolutely right. It did suck big time, since its inception. And fcp was so much better for so long. And everyone did also suddenly change their mind when fcpx came out. CS5.5 became 'hip.'

    But since CS5, it really has been fantastic. What happened w/ fcpx was this: NLEs are difficult to master, and always are very unappealing when first used because of the lack of familiarity. It wasn't until fcpx went so wrong that people had any incentive to get past that initial discomfort. By that time, Premiere had become really great, in many ways that weren't even on Apple's map. I was a pre-fcpx switch over, because I needed more.

    Relax. You are happy with Avid, and have every right to be. It is a great software renowned for its rock solid stability - I can say it never crashed while I used it. What I do want to share is that, after I became familiar w/ Premiere and how to use it best (like we had all become with fcp, knowing every little workaround for its quirks), I have to say that I love it.

  • @sohus I guess you're still living in 2004. Remember to sell your stocks when you approach 2006.

    @rbna Premiere imports and exports both Final Cut Pro and Avid projects.

    With a powerful system and right ("certified") video card -- Premiere has been a dream since version 5, not even the newest Avid Media Composer competes. Here in the US it's somewhere in every studio, and I understand the BBC implemented Premiere Pro on a large scale last year.

    You can import almost anything, stick almost anything on any timeline, and color correct anything you import in a 12 bit 4:4:4 color space. Stability is exceptional. On my system (that doesn't suck) I'm encoding out at real time -- or much faster for low end stuff.

    Relative to the "hacked" GH2 -- the workflow goes like this: 1) import 2) edit 3) export.

  • @sohus Count me in as another Premiere fanatic. Didn't use it till FCP fiasco and CS5.5 has been an absolute dream. It looks and feels like what FCP8 could have been.

  • @onionbrain So do you just use the MTS files through your entire workflow, not transcoding at all before editing / compositing / color correcting etc? Or do you Clipwrap or such into ProRes?

  • @rbna yes, I would also add the advantage of going from premiere to after effects and vice-versa, always using your mts files until export. In premiere you can edit in real time (helps if you have a certified GPU) no render needed

  • Even if AVCHD its not a great format for editing, if you aren´t doing any major grading you just don´t need to transcode...it saves you valuable time and disk space...

  • *** NEW **** Quantum v8 BETA - The Q Theory/Rate Control. An experimental beta.

    A new theory for trying out different Q on the range of REC MODES. Limits will look strange as Q has been analysed, bitrate settings may look strange to you (but they will record considerably lower than bitrates entered), and frame limits have been adjusted according to Q. The whole theory here is about rate control in h.264 AVC codec and seeing where bitrate is allocated to the amount of detail. Its still early days on this, so I expect failures. Take a look and report to me. I need real world tryouts - not neccesarily static death charts (you can take the 1080p frame limit back down to around 6080808 if you want death charts recorded) - and before you ask, YES, I expect streamparser graphs to now move up and down on all settings and adjust bitrate according to the details in the picture. Let me know how you get on. This is NO replacement for other versions of Quantum, just a new theory to test. 50p/50i will be addressed in beta v9 over the next day or so. Thank you.

    Nick

    Quantum v8 BETA - The Q theory - sete.zip
    956B
  • @driftwood There is no mention of AQ value in the Quantum v8 patch. Is that mean that it reverts back to the stock value which is AQ=0 (all to motion)?

  • @Zaven13 No, its manual Q.

  • @driftwood This is a very interesting arrangement! Although former homework has not been finished yet, I can study moreover. Thanks mate! :-)

  • @rbna Have a look at this: http://newsletters.creativecow.net/

    If it's Avid or Premiere is up to you. I'll never go back to Avid, since they screwed me badly after years of promoting and teaching their system. But that's just me, they seem to be a more humble company by now.

    I switched to FCP and was a loyal follower for years. Then they screwed me. So, time for a change again.

    When Premiere was at version 5, I thought "what a silly joke from a company that brought us Photoshop". It's not a joke any more, they became serious about editing.

    We have a pretty large arts university lab here and are switching to Premiere because of: similarity of handling to FCP, integration with AEFX, native support of H.264 and REDcode and educational pricing. But you need heavy machines to really enjoy it.

    Remember, Apple is a phone company now. They won't fix FCP.

  • @rbna answering your question on the http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/1888/gh2-post-production-workflows thread. Thanks @sohus. I was just about to post that link but you beat me to it!

  • @driftwood not sure what I'm looking for. You know the drill with my test by now. 14-140 with some slow and quicker zooms.

    All of the 720p60 h and sh write failed. With af on/off with zoom fast/slow all of the 1080i 60 failed fsh and sh. Same as above.

    They all write errored right around the 3-4 sec mark. This was with sandisk 30mb/sec. They even failed when the camera was motionless and af off.

    Since all of these failed so quickly streamparser doesn't have a lot, no up downs since it just fails. 720p sh is 2pframe, 1 iframe, both right at 230000. Same on h, values a little lower.

    1080i fsh all i frame at 450000.

    same on 95mb/ sec just lasted longer.

    for 24p: went out to 40 seconds before stopping(not fail, I just stopped filming). I frames in streamp show some up down values. From 510000 to 680000. One big drop to 340000.

    I am moving the camera and periodically zooming in with af so that's to be expected, I think.

  • @driftwood I tested Quantum v8 today with 24L and 300%. I used the Voigtländer 25mm/0.95 and a 16GB SanDisk 30MB/s card and spanning did work until the card was full. Quicktime 7 shows a average bitrate of 50-60MBit/s. Quality is great, but I think there is more macro blocking in dark areas than Quantum v7, but I didn't do comparison shots.

  • Something strange happened on the job today. I hacked my GH2 with quantum v7 yesterday and it seemed stable with 64GB 95MB/s card. But this morning on the job, after taking six footages (each footage about 3 minutes long), I got a message saying I reached the maximum numbers on files. I had to pull out d7000 while downloading the footages from GH2 and reformatted the card, then I was able to take a few more. When I got home, I realized that 6th footage was corrupted. Has anyone encounter this issue before?

  • @bumkicho Thats an issue with lots of patches with extreme cards it seems. The 6th footage should be able to be recovered. Keep the whole private folder together - copy it to hard disk - and perform one of the Panasonic AVC tools 'recover' proggies. Links are all over personal-view so do a search.

  • @chauncy Qv8 is very experimental - I already know death chart failures. But under most normal conditions the bitrate will now go up and down rather than constant on streamparser/streameye etc... and the Q looks in some cases more stabilised. However, taming it is a bitch at this early stage. We keep going... we keep testing... but I need to see how good QP is performing and what is causing macroblocking with these settings. Thanks once again for your strict testing and results. Nick

  • @tobnyot Interesting results. Is there any way you could report your quality findings with streameye or similar QP/macroblocking results?

  • Guys, this is where I'm at with Quantum v8. I am looking more at setting up AVC rate control so that it performs allocating bitrate to detail quality. Presently, limiting the frames (Frame Limit = 6080808) keeps things constant (ie it will always record fixed i frame size for all frames). This is nice and high but wastes a lot of space for details not necessarily requiring that amount of bitrate. This is proven with the V8 patch, that if you record the same scene you'll see the bitrate being controlled more effeciently, the problem is high detail where the frame size needs a much higher requirement. The only way to enable bitrate to required quality (a part of rate control) is by lifting the frame limit to a higher setting (back towards the default like here in Quantum v8) and changing Quantisation. However in doing this, anything above 800,000b for frame sizes for more than x amount of seconds will eventually cause a write fail. It seems for INTRA (not other gops) a frame setting limit of around 6080808 is max. Now we are looking at matching all the other settings around this which means changing a lot of things like IQ, Q, Time, buffers and bitrate to alter the encoder to these factors we have found for INTRA. If we can crack rate control, we should be able to sort out a lot of problems which currently cause the recording to stop, spanning, and most importantly quality.

  • @driftwood sorry, I have no windows machine around here, so I can't use Streamparser. But I did a comparison shot between Quantum v7 24H, Quantum v7 24L, Quantum v8 24H & Quantum v8 24L. I attached frame grabs, a direct comparison & a direct comparison with adjusted levels. If you want the .MTS files, I could upload it for you. I used the Panasonic 14-140mm lens with OIS off and the cam was on a tripod. Aperture was 18, shutter was 1/8s, ISO at 160, focal length 140mm and I used the variable movie mode at 300%. I recorded 1 minute which resulted in files with a length of ca. 20 seconds and I made the frame grabs at 10 seconds. Quicktime 7 shows the following bitrates:

    Quantum v7 24H 142.86 MBit/s

    Quantum v7 24L 102.25 MBit/s

    Quantum v8 24H 104.84 MBit/s

    Quantum v8 24L 103.47 MBit/s

    For me Quantum v7 shows a slightly better result, especially at 24H. For long shots with 300% at 24L I like Quantum v8 better because it spans, which v7 didn't for me as soon as the scene got a little detailed.

    Quantum_Comparison_Levels.png
    1920 x 1080 - 970K
    Quantum_Comparison.png
    1920 x 1080 - 7M
    Quantum_v7_24H.png
    1920 x 1080 - 6M
    Quantum_v7_24L.png
    1920 x 1080 - 5M
    Quantum_v8_24H.png
    1920 x 1080 - 5M
    Quantum_v8_24L.png
    1920 x 1080 - 5M
  • *** NEW *** Quantum v9 The Rate Controller!

    This is the result of trying to harness rate control back with high bitrates and INTRA. Now you will see your recordings Q vary more (on some of the settings) according to detail being filmed. This has possibly a much better chance of spanning too. Settings: 1080p24H=154000000 (154M) 1080p24L=112000000 (112M) 1080i/720p FSH/SH=80000000 1080i/720p FH/H=60000000 Auto Quantizer for 1080 modes=4 Auto Quantizer for 720 modes=3 720p50 GOP Size=3 (GOP3) 720p60 GOP Size=3 (GOP3) 1080i50 and 1080p24 GOP Size=1 (INTRA) 1080i60 GOP Size=1 (INTRA) Encoder setting 1 1080i/p=1 1080p24 Frame Limit=6128320 60fps Frame Limit=1413779 50fps Frame Limit=1687144

    This enjoys very good Q and needs testing on detailed real world subject matter. Let me know how you get on. Got a sneeky feeling we're getting close all rounder with this one. Some of the pictures I have shot with this patch have been stunning.

    Test away! Nick

    Driftwood Quantum v9 Beta - setj.zip
    843B
  • @driftwood I did a quick test with Quantum v9. Image quality looks great in 24H and 24L. 24H fails at spanning and the death chart which is no problem for me. A problem is that in 24L spanning doesn't work with my SanDisk 30 MB/s card.

  • I realize I'm behind the curve here, but made some discoveries this week while testing for a patch to shoot heavily stylized Blade Runner type footage. (all tests are with 24H setting at ISOs 200, 400, and 800.) (edit: All tungsten lighting and WB)

    The EOSHD's Roadrunner patch is unusable for what we're trying to do (Hazy noir type lighting with heavy crush in post). Data rate hovers about 25Mb/s, and when shooting haze/smoke it produces a TON of noise and Artifacting, and the data rate drops to 14.

    Quantum v5 is noisy at anything short of - 1/3 EV. The data rate comes in at a consistent at 149Mb/s but won't span on my San Disk 32GB 95 card.

    We've settled on shooting Q v2 which hovers around 88Mb/s, spans just fine, and produces a smooth fine grain even at -2 EV.

    Also, with all patches, I've discovered that the manual white balance sample and set function (the next to last option to the right) creates noise. You really need to either use one of the presets or dial in the balance by adjusting the temp (last option on the right), using the sample white function to set white balance creates something similar to the ISO bug, insane noise.

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