'Apocalypse Now' Experimental Series 1 Thread - BOOM, Intravenus - cbrandin/driftwood AN Soft/Cinema

mistan

Jesus, this thread is a complete mess and I'm not even sure of what to go with. There's been settings-upload mistakes, claims of "garbage settings", bad comparisons, photo-upload mistakes, claims of different settings being useless by one person but significant by others. I'd rather just wait a couple of days until this is sorted out and we see a few real tests/comparisons on the differences.

SuperSet

@Zaven13 Ok, I'm not a professional so all of this should be viewed through amateur eyes. Maybe you guys can see the differences. I'm also uploading video to Vimeo so will post that when it's finished processing.

ETA: Comparison video as well:

vicharris

@jrd AHHHHHHHHH, just saw the edit. My bad.

jrd

@vicharris

The comparison is not valid. The apparent differences resulted from combining the images.

vicharris

@jrd Much better cropped shot. Thanks. Yep, it looks like a flatter pic to me.

vicharris

@kodakmoment Why the hell are you even on here? If you think none of the patches work, stop posting and pissing people off. I feel like you're trolling at this point. If people think they see better images, then let them. Why piss on their parade? Really?

jrd

@flaschus

EDIT: PLEASE DISREGARD THIS POST. THE DIFFERENCES SEEN IN THE ATTACHMENT ARE AN ARTIFACT OF THE PHOTO EDITING SOFTWARE. THIS IS NOT A MEANINGFUL COMPARISON!

After staring at your carpet for too long, I'm not sure of anything -- the shots seem to look different on different systems. Anyway, I'm attaching a comparison crop, which is consistent with the claims in my prior past, for what they're worth.

pundit

@peternap Seemingly post is where many of these patches really show their mettle, especially under less than ideal conditions.

peternap

@pundit They will and to be honest, FM, Sanity, AN, Sedna, Etc. are all good settings. Some stronger in certain areas than others. A lot of it has to do with how well they preform in post which again can be very subjective.

Some just look better to me and that's where personal taste takes over.

A few years ago I was photographing in a swamp. The Cattails all had new heads, the light was beautiful and I got a picture of a Cattail field that went as far as I could see with Redwing Blackbirds landing in them.

On one of the photo boards, a photographer from New York City posted, "Why would you take a picture of a bunch of weeds".

Everyone sees things differently.

botha

@Rambo: You can be shure Onionbrain knows what he ist talking about, he's an experienced pro photographer. I tell you what, for all the morons and dumbasses that are whining and complaining here - simply don't use these patches !!! If you can't see the difference, these settings aren't for you, it's very simple !

abraham1307

@Zaven13 Thanks for a better comparison. The difference between FM and AN are noticeable in my eyes, thanks for taking the time to post up these screen shots btw.

Zaven13

@SuperSet. Good idea. You lucky guy... This forum just nominated you to do that testing...

driftwood

This is becoming messy. The quantisation process and matrices are better described by one of h264's world specialist's - Ian Richardson. If any of our thread readers want to get deep into the theory and calculations - simply read his books /visit his site at http://www.vcodex.com/h264.html. Theres links and threads also in p-v.

ND in France on a iphone. Happy shooting.

kodakmoment

@Zaven13 Yes, thanks again for your test! Southern California, that's what I thought.

pundit

I'm still relatively new to all of this but my understanding is that under ideal (well lit) conditions there will be generally less discernible differences between many of these patches (settings).

SuperSet

How about comparing it to Sanity as well since there's a big difference, filesize wise?

Zaven13

@kodakmoment. The landscape is the Angeles National golf course in Sunland, California, part of Los Angeles county. You are right. The differences are insignificant. The only mode that the difference is slightly more visible is 24p.

Rambo

Onionbrain (DrewNet) made some big statements both in his original promo video of Apocalypse Now and here in print http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/81924#Comment_81924 "As a side note -- having viewed this stuff on calibrated production monitors and large screen projections -- I will tell you and everyone without qualification that this is the best looking footage I've ever seen from a hacked GH".

I'd like to see actual evidence of what OnionBrain is seeing here to backup these claims. If you are going to be that outspoken on promoting this patch, then you owe it to the lesser experience users here (myself included) to provide such proof. I'm not discounting the work people have done here, but we need to see what you see rather than just take your word for it, else it becomes just hype.

flaschus

@jrd...

ru sure that u didn't get them mixed up? i thought the carpet was darker in the "444" than the "flo", and also the 444 matrix seems to be darker in @zaven13's findings also?

cbrandin

@LPowell - Most of the decoders I've seen take the PPS QP value, add the macroblock QP offset, multiply that by the matrix entry, shift right 4 (divide by 16), and use the result to look up the Q value from the quantization table. This is done for each matrix entry in the frequency domain. This is a somewhat simplified explanation as the PPS QP entry is actually the QP value -26 (I don't know why they did this). Offhand, I don't remember the exact sequence, but it's close to what I described. The JM decoder probably doesn't do it that way because it is not optimized at all - but practical decoders typically work essentially that way. The design of the H.264 standard takes 16 bit processors into account so that CODECS can be as efficient as possible.

So, to recap - A frame QP value (frames in the GH2 are single slices) is added to a QP offset for a macroblock, that value is multiplied by the appropriate quantization matrix value, the product is divided by 16, then that value becomes the index into the quantization table.

kodakmoment

@Zaven13 Chapeau! What I see is that I hardly see anything. There isn't much of a difference between the two settings which illustrates my point that a GH2 stays a GH2. Where is this landscape btw?

LPowell

@Zaven13 Thanks for the comparison shots. Something looks amiss in the last shot, however, FM_24H-140zoom_freeway_ETC, that's not present in the other shots. Atmospheric distortion from the auto exhausts, perhaps?

Zaven13

I have noticed people on this forum are getting a little lazy and are waiting for others to do the testings of the various settings for them. Sometimes you need to generate a little bit of controversy to get their juices flowing again. That's what I did by posting the two pictures from FM2 and AN-444 earlier knowing that they were not a fair comparison. So as I promised, below, I have included the frame captures of FM2 and AN nebula 444 in as close of a conditions you can get using one GH2. top 6 are AN-Nebula-444 and bottom 6 are FM 2.02. The difference in timing is 5 minutes which is the time I needed to reload the second setting. Conditions and camera settings are all the same (Panasonic 14-140 lens, STD film mode, straight out of camera, Sunny 11 AM, 95 degree heat). I have used Nature mode for FSH/SH. Names of the pictures indicate what they are. As you can see, the differences are not as significant as the pictures I posted earlier. They are both very good settings.

One observation for @LPowell, I have noticed that when using longer zooms (100-300 specially with ETC on), FM 2.02 looses more detail and quality than say Cluster settings as you can see from the ETC pictures I posted below. I have noticed it in other occasions that I have tested. May be that is something you can look into for a future update. Hope this is more helpful.

jrd

EDIT: VK doesn't like deleted posts, so PLEASE NOTE: The conclusions below were based on artifacts introduced by the photo editing software in the course of combining two images. KINDLY DISREGARD.

==============================

The two Flaschus shots are not quite identical, which may have influenced the result, but if you put them side by side, the most glaring difference is in the carpet -- it's a darker shade in FM than Valkyrie, and FM appears to pull out more detail, maybe for that reason. The difference isn't subtle.

When you start raising the blacks to get shadow detail, there appears to be more noise in Valkyrie. Push it to an extreme, and there's more apparent macroblocking in Valkyrie.

Again, am not taking sides, just trying to use my eyes. Maybe the engineers and colorists among us will have more useful or valid observations.

LPowell

@cbrandin Agreed. What's not explicit in that reference is a description of how the Scaling Tables are applied in calculating the effective Q. Here's a link to a paper that documents how Qstep is modified by each Matrix_Value :

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CD8QFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww-ee.uta.edu%2Fdip%2Fcourses%2Fee5356%2Fh264review.doc&ei=i3JGUOvaKOfyiQK-yIDADg&usg=AFQjCNHwiiZoMmZGpkyQzcf7GBA-FXFTuA&sig2=-CK79BYpEwMVvd70z8sU8g&cad=rja

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