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GH2 Cake v2.3: reliability and spanning in 720p, HBR, 24p, and VMM at 2-2.5x stock bit rates
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  • I like Cake 2.3 very much for its look, fluidity, colours, resolution. What I don't understand is that the in-cam replays fail half of the time in the 80%-24H mode & once in a while in 24H - on all my cards (Lexar 400x, Lexar 600x, Sandisk 80Mb/s), even on my brand new, reformatted Sandisk 95Mb/s 32GB! Don't know what could help...

    Wish I could say it's perfect, though: I really like its silky, bright results in all of its modes ; (

  • Thanks for the feedback. In-camera playback was never one of my concerns, and so I didn't develop for that. Sometimes turning the camera off and back on will cure playback problems.

  • Indeed, turning off the camera dodges that small "hindrance" altogether. Nonetheless, your settings add a very special glow to my motion pictures and therefore are touching perfection in a way. A 1000 thks!

  • More cakey goodness - this is a complete video taster of a new CD using some of the footage you saw before. I don't claim to be a grading guru but I love the way you can do nice things with Cake.

  • Hi guys, im new to Cake 2.3, but man, it's a very lovely hack, i've tested quite a few hacks, mostly Driftwood's, i liked the looks, but the file size are quite big, and also, reliability and stability issues made me not feel too comfortable using them. Then recently i started looking for decent hacks with smaller file size with stability and bam! i ran into Cake, so i tried it. I really like it, i added a lil film grain with film convert to make it even more filmic, and i recorded the clip with smooth -2-2-2-2.I'm however not a pro film maker neither do i really understamd the full technical details of this hacks, but i like Cake.

  • Hi balazer: I've been using v2.3 on my GH2s for a while. First of all thank you for the great work. While my GH2s have been stable for the most part, tonight one of the cameras stopped recording after about 30 minutes. The file was only 2.5GB so it wasn't a spanning issues. I was shooting a high contrast scene with very dark background and a violinist in the center. The camera was set in manual focus, and ISO at 640. I know it's not my SD card . I'm wondering if ISO 640 was too much for the camera/encoder? I read somewhere else on this forum that higher ISO settings can cause the GH2 to stop recording. Any advice?

  • I'm not sure what your issue was, but I don't think it's anything about the ISO setting. I routinely shoot much higher than ISO 640.

    Was there much motion in the frame just before the recording stopped? I mean big motion, like in a third of the frame or more. Motion is really the only thing that could cause the encoder to fail, and even then it shouldn't the way I designed Cake.

    If it wasn't an encoder failure, then it's almost certainly a failure related to recording throughput, i.e. a card failure. You say it isn't the card, but it's basically impossible to know that unless you get problems consistently with one card and not with others. One failure isn't enough information to judge by. All it takes is slightly reduced write throughput one time in one spot on the card coincident with a little bump in the video bit rate, and the buffer will overflow and the recording will stop. So with a bit of bad luck, a card that's been working fine for a long time can cause a rare failure. And a card that's been performing well can develop problems later.

    The best thing would be to just stop using that card. Once a card has given you trouble, it should be considered suspect and not used for any important recordings. The type of card really matters. Sandisk Extreme and Extreme Pro are the only cards I trust. If you are determined to keep using the same card, then I recommend performing several full overwrite formattings with the SD Card Association's formatter utility. The card can determine if there are bad blocks and map around them, and you want that to happen while you're formatting, not while you're recording. It's good periodic maintenance for all of your cards.

  • Thanks for the response balazer. The scene I was shooting did not have a lot of movements. My other GH2 was running Cake v2.3 at the same time from a different angle, with the same type of SD card and it ran for 1.5 hours just fine, and that angle had consistent movement. I will try running SDFormatter like you suggested and see if it helps.

    I also was digging through the rest of this thread, and at one point you said that HBR mode isn't as stable as 24p and it may cause problems? I primarily shoot in HBR mode.

    Do you think the new Sandisk Extreme is should be enough for Cake? (40MB/s Write) It is a lot cheaper than the Pro version which is nice. I shoot long continuous footages and I need a 64GB card.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MBFPT3A/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER