Hi there!

It's my first post here. I have some questions about Flow Motion. On the first page there is an information that this patch gives me access to both PAL 25/50p and NTSC 30/60p frame rates. Does that mean that I can choose between PAL and NTSC or just PAL (I've bought my gh2 in UE)? The other thing is about FM and TimeBuster. When I add TB, 24P mode is shooting at 2fps. Does it change anything else in other film options or not interfere in FlowMotion settings?

@Brian_Siano As you've seen, Windows is confused by high-bitrate Flow Motion files, but video editors like Premiere Pro have no difficulty playing back the files as intended.

File spanning on the GH2 is a rather fragile mechanism and works reliably only in specific conditions with Flow Motion v2. If you have a 95MB/sec 64GB SD card, file spanning should work in all video modes except for NTSC HBR 1080p30 mode. With slower SD cards, file spanning will work reliably in FM2's 60Mbps modes: 24L, FH, and H video modes in both PAL and NTSC.

That's called "spanning". It means when the file size reaches 4GB a new one is created for continued recording. PPro handels those files correct, don't give much on file properties in windows (and windows media player).

@Alex_K and @spreeni: Turns out that both of you were right: I was actually using the wrong card; I'd installed the patch using the cheap, slow card that came with the camera, and hadn't swapped in the extreme pro. Apologies to all: will try it properly this weekend.

@spreeni That's the card I've been using: I'd tried Flow Motion with a slower Class 10 card and had problems, so I got the Extreme Pro. I'll try the lower bitrate settings, but I was hoping to really push the camera's capabilities here.

So I basically have two questions: any idea what I might be doing wrong, and what other high-bit-rate patches should I be trying out?

Try a 95MB/s Sandisk Exteme Pro SDXC Card or use the lower bitrate modes.

Try another card. Try http://personal-view.com/talks/categories/hack-top-settings

Running into a small problem with Flow Motion v 2.02. I just installed a Sandisk Extreme Pro card, 36 gig, with gives me about ten minutes of recording time. My first etst was to just run the camera at length, to see if it cut out or spanned. Well, the camera cut out after about seven miniutes. (This may be due to my using ISO 2500.)

I'm trying a continuous-run at 640 ISO. Much better: it's run for nearly half an hour, so that's good. It still reports a fair amount of storage left: I attribute this to the fact that the scenery's much darker, so it's probably going back to low bitrates. So I'm not certain about the spanning, either: I guess I'll have to try this in sunlight.

Suggestions, pointers, advice, etc.?

@radikalfilm

If on Windows I suggest exporting to DNxHD (the older 2.2.x codec!), as 2.3.x has a colorspace conversion bug in 32bpc AE projects;

That must be what happened to me. On the 32bit timeline it looked almost like some kind of "zebra pixels" feature that was showing, in some scenes, the hottest or most deeply saturated parts of the image. Ugh, good to know about the version, thanks! I had to go back and re-transcode the whole lot of clips to ProRes.

so for my flowmotion hack footage i'm only getting the "diagonal rain" artifacts in CS6 on a PC. I no longer have CS5.5. I just played the flowmotion back in potplayer and the diagonal rain was gone. i then played back intravenous 2 footage and got no artifacting in CS6. adobe premiere pro cs6 has something going haywire when playing flowmotion footage . also, for what it's worth, i get no artifacts on the GH3 footage in premiere.

next i took the flowmotion footage and ran it through 5dtoRGB. it transformed a 4 gb, 12 min clip into a 100 gb clip. after importing it into CS6 and playing it back, no diagonal rain! but i'm going through a dozen interviews that are 2-6 hours long each, and each interview filmed with 3 different cameras! my storage needs would become preposterous if i were to transform all of my interviews with 5dtoRGB.

lastly, i rendered some of the original flowmotion footage in premiere pro into a youtube format, with the hope that the diagonal rain would be gone after an export and conversion, but unfortunately, it the diagonal rain showed in my final .mp4 footage, no matter what player i used.

going forward, i'll try to contact adobe, but i doubt they'll help me out with hacked footage. since i'm still filming, i've changed the hack on my 3 Gh2s from flowmotion to intravenous 2. the intravenous looks astoundingly better than flowmotion anyways, i wish i had filmed all of those interviews in intravenous2, and now i don't have to deal with any artifacts or 5dtoRGb. i hope a solution comes up for all the hours of flowmotion footage i've already filmed.

I would imagine so, but they are a really, really slow moving company. If it enters the queue behind the "make every part of the program work at the bit depth of the project setting" support ticket it may never get resolved internally.

@SeekingHeartwood In all the tests I've run so far, the "digital rain" artifacts that appear in Adobe After Effects CS6 did not appear in After Effects CS5.5. If you have access to either CS5.5 or CS6, I'd be interested to hear more details of your results.

@SeekingHeartwood Be interested to see an example. My personal experience of Flowmotion is that it is the most reliable of hacks. I have had 100% success with it and now don't even give it a second thought. My route to post is via Clipwrap converting to Avid DNX or ProRes depending on edit.