Which settings for GH2 concert recording (classical)?

THX1965

I've done quite a bit of testing with all the wonderful new driftwood patches, as well as with the updated Flowmotion.

I'd love to hear from someone who's done this before - successfully:

in 2 weeks, I will shoot a classical concert (orchestra), on a great looking concert stage, with two GH2s. One's going to be a static wide shot and the second one will shoot close up and different angles. The concert will run about 90 minutes total. The location will be bright enough, but I'd say I most likely will have to use an ISO of 640 or 800 in order to be able to shoot with an f 5.6.

I do own two fast 64 GB 95mb/s SandDisc cards. - I'll be shooting this in 24p.

I certainly want it to look as good as possible (with as fine a noise grain as possible - considering my ISO), but I also need about 40-50 minutes of continuous recording time per segment - and the full 90 minutes should fit on each of the 64 GB cards.

I'd really appreciate any real world feedback for this kind of task. VBR or CBR? What kind of bit rate should I be going for? Would any of the new Driftwood patches be suited for this?

Thank you so much in advance.

--- Markus ---

DrDave

That noise bug will really bite. I accidentally forgot to switch down from the middle row once and I could not believe how much extra noise there was.

balazer

It's enough to just switch to the higher ISO and then switch back. You don't need to set it.

THX1965

@blazer - thanks for the noise bug warning! I thought this was only the case with 320.

So, do I get this right - every time you turn the camera on you have to switch to a higher ISO setting, then back to 1250 or 320? So in the case of 320 for example, do you have to select 400, confirm with SET, then go back into ISO and select 320? I assume it's not just enough to switch to 400 and then right back to 320

Thanks. This is a very important tip.

balazer

Great to hear that. Thanks for testing.

Make sure you know how to handle the ISO noise bug at 1250. http://www.personal-view.com/faqs/gh2-usage/gh2-usage

THX1965

@balazer - I guess I am a Cake 2.0 fan now!

I shot a lenghty orchestra rehearsal today and your settting performed beautifully. 24H, ISO 800 and ISO 1250 - very clean and fine grained. I am very happy with the quality vs. file size.

Brian_Siano

Mark: I hadn';t thought of that, but it seems likely.

BTW, the footage I shot was a bit grainy at 640 ISO, less so at 320-- not horribly so, but I could see it.

But, the sound DID play through the HDMI port, so that question's resolved.

Mark_the_Harp

That's not the LCD / EVF auto-switching is it? Sometimes loading new firmware will change the camera's settings, for example switching to the EVF when you get too close to the back of the camera. You can reduce the sensitivity of this, or disable it.

Brian_Siano

@edgenumbers, I'll give that a shot, too.

I just tried the Cake 2.0 patch, but under very loose conditions. Seems to work OK, but for some reason, my camera screen blanks out every so often. I haven't seen this happen before.

edgenumbers

@Brian_Siano, I am using a combo of bkmcwd's Natural v1.11, sedna matrix and the Pasadena Pulse Audio V2 Beta2 audio patch. It's working really well for me with a sandisk 64gb SDXC card. Spans perfectly and even if the card runs out it keeps the last file.

Attached are a copy of these merged settings. I am new to this so I hope I have done it right :)

Brian_Siano

I was directed to this thread because I had a similar question: I'll be shooting a theatrical performance, where many of the issues are the same. I've installed the Cake 2.0 patch, and I hope that'll work.

I did learn that, when the audio sample rates are set higher than 19200, the sound won't play back on the camera. Will it play back with an external HDMI monitor?

(And yes, I did try several searches to find previously-discussed answers to this question. Didn't work out.)

brianluce

@ DrDave I shoot a lot of orchestra stuff. just make sure your cut ins are face close up where you cant see the hands hitting notes/chords. No need to sync that.

DrDave

You can use cut ins from rehearsal that are real closeups, then you won't see that the music stands are not in the same place, and so on. Just make sure they have the same accessories. The thing is, it is a real pain to sync the audio with cut ins from a rehearsal. That's why I like the IS zoom for closeups.

thepalalias

@THX1965 Way to think ahead. :)

THX1965

@Bueller - you are absolutely right. But I did shoot a concert there already last fall. Only I didn't have my GH2 then - I was a Canon guy until early this year.

The good thing is, the orchestra is going to do a full rehearsal right before the actual concert - with the actual lighting and everything. I'll have 2 hours to get everything set up optimally. Without that luxury, I'd be very nervous, since you never know what your'e going to get... ;-)

If I can get them to wear their actual concert attire during the rehearsal, I could get some great close-ups that I couldn't get during the actual concert.

Bueller

Sounds like some fun THX. If you haven't yet I would mention that you should go down there with your GH2 beforehand and see what show lighting really looks like and what ISO you will be able to shoot at. Sorry If I sound like my mother. Sounds like you have probably already done that.

THX1965

Excellent info, everyone. I really do appreciate all this great feedback!

thepalalias

@THX1965 Sounds great. He can also record at higher sample rate just fine as long as he doesn't downsample using the ProTools algorithim - you can see on graphs how it's performance is one of the worst in the industry and you can hear it to.

Recording at the right sample rate is easier for you and foolproof, but he might want the higher sample rate for any audiophiles in the orchestra.

Mark_the_Harp

Great! That's the curse of classical music - the dreaded score. I love it when people don't use them!!

THX1965

I'll be shooting mostly from the back of the theater, so the conductor will be in front of his music stand anyway, covering it most of the time. It's not going to be a big issue.

Mark_the_Harp

Good luck. Looks like a great hall! You mentioned blowing-out of the conductor's score, but if it's a big issue on the locked-off shots, you could probably correct that area a bit in post. Only other obvious thing really would apply to any artificial lighting - check that the you are not getting any weird strobing effects from the lighting. Shouldn't be an issue but one more thing to make sure of.

THX1965

Thanks @thepalalias for the 48/24 resampling tip. The sound engineer's got a Mac ProTools system in his recording booth. I'll make sure he picks the right sampling rate. (One should never assume anything...)

And I'll throw SpanMyBitchUp into the testing mix!

thepalalias

And the bitrates for SpanMyBU v1 were around 70mbits/sec if I remember correctly, so you would be fine.

thepalalias

If for any reason the .WAVs are not 48/24 make sure to resample using Izotope SRC (RX, Wave Editor, Sample Manager, etc.) or Voxengo r8brain, not the Apple software. Big difference.

Oh, and if you're going to test patches, you might as well test SpanMyBU V1. I haven't tried V2 for something like this but V1 gave a nice motion compression and shadow noise with good spanning for me in the past, since it's an intra option. Also, sorry for the formatting, my phone hates apostrophes for some reason.

THX1965 · Screen Shot 2012-03-21 at 12.22.55 PM.png

I'll bring some matches...

DrDave

As long as the wavs are 48/24 you will be cooking with gas!

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