@ jrd: i totally agree with you. Comparisons that are not polemic and not just simply exploit weaknesses of a setting to let another setting triumph, are really usefull. For me its sometimes a settings-jungle. Each party praises its own setting, but that does not help my comparing.

I think those comparisons are still interesting though and i am thankful Lee does them. It gives me a hint which setting might be good for me in which situation. But i think its not good to play those settings out against eachother, because both have their strengths and weaknesses. Both serve their cause.

@peternap: can you recommend me a good intra setting? Good in the sense of reliable and very good picture? I like BOOM! a lot, but its a rather specialised intra setting. I am looking for a good allround one. Cheers m8

@LPowell I really don't understand the comparison Lee. Boom and Flow Motion are two different animals. Nick states flatly that Boom isn't intended for wide shots or 720. It's an experimental close up setting. I don't entirely agree with that and I have had good results in extremely low light.

Flow Motion is the action setting I and many others go to. I wouldn't consider any other for sports or fast moving events.

Why bother to compare apples and oranges? The constant 200% views and insults are distracting from the extremely good work you both do.

@LPowell says " ...the Flat 4s matrix is extremely sharp..."

?? excuse my ignorance but at first sight , Apocalypse Boom Flat 4s matrix looks like blurred compared to FMv2 , IMHO there is somethings that i didn't understand?

@L1N3ARX LOL you can't believe how many place like that there are in Italy ! no one has made a horror movie yet , cause most of the houses are in danger of collapse, in fact there are barriers with signs prohibiting access... anyway we entered LOL

@valpopando Do you live in Italy? Seeing such an epic example of a ghost town in this condition makes me so incredibly jealous. I can't even imagine all the amazing things I could shoot there, I almost can't believe it hasn't already been used in a major horror film. Puts things into perspective when a few old wooden shacks around here in the States can qualify as a ghost town; then you see this... damn.

@jdmproductions1 Yeah I think thats what happened to me, does your HBR mode also fail after 4 min?

Flow Motion v2.02 versus Apocalypse Now - Boom Flat 4s - 24H mode

The latest version of Apocalypse Now - Boom Flat 4s, uses a GOP-1 all-Intra patch for 1080p24 video (as well as for 25p and 30p video modes). What makes this Intra patch interesting is its 1080p24 quantization Scaling Table. Standard GH2 quantization matrices use finer quantizers for the broad details than are used to encode the more minute details in an image. This technique takes advantage of psycho-visual properties of human vision, allocating larger portions of the encoder's available bitrate to features the eyes are most sensitive to. The Flat 4s matrix used in Apocalypse Now Boom instead takes the radical approach of quantizing all spatial features in an image at the same level of precision. That same matrix is also used for chroma channels as well as for the luma channel.

Compared to the earlier Apocalypse Now Pseudo-444 Soft matrix by Chris Brandin, the Flat 4s matrix is extremely sharp. Rather than attempting to simulate a 4:4:4 color space, the Flat 4s matrix records all available image data indiscriminately at the finest practical level of quantization. In addition, the GOP-1 setting in this patch encodes all image data in individual I-frames, at a peak bitrate of about 150Mbps. What this means is that Apocalypse Now Boom Flat 4s is one of the purest examples yet of applied brute force - it is designed to record as much data as it can at the highest practical bitrate in each individual frame of the video.

Flow Motion v2 uses customized Scaling Tables as well. Unlike Flat 4s, the quantization matrices used in FM2 are designed to discriminate between luma and chroma channels, using high-precision quantizers for finely detailed luma data while smoothing the minute details of the chroma data. I optimized it this way because I felt that even with 100Mbps, it was vital not to squander its bitrate on image details that are visually imperceptible.

Using Stream Parser, we can examine the differences in the encoding properties of the two patches. In the screen shot below, the Flow Motion v2 chart is on the left and the Apocalypse Now Boom Flat 4s chart is on the right:

Many of the statistics in these charts are similar - the QP and DC columns (which measure peak image quality) are close to the same (and as Chris Brandin explained earlier, DC values below 5 produce no further perceptible improvement in image quality). The differences that stand out are in the Max and Range columns, which indicate the worst case image quality. It can be seen here that Flow Motion v2 permits only a narrow range of QP factors, maintaining consistent image quality within the macroblocks of each frame. Apocalypse Now Boom Flat 4s extends into a much wider range of QP factors, allowing image quality to become very coarse among many of the macroblocks in a frame. Even at 150Mbps peak, there doesn't appear to be enough available bitrate to encode all the details in the Flat 4s matrix at the intended level of image quality.

Here are unedited 200% crop frame grabs from the two video files analyzed in the above Stream Parser report. Differences in the detailed image quality of the two patches can be seen in the rusted metal mandalas:

Flow Motion v2.02:

Apocalypse Now - Boom Flat 4s:

I wanted a 64 GB card, to store more stuff, but is it better, for fragmentation problems to have 2 32 GB cards?

keep in mind, that I also experienced a nightmare when my sdxc card would not connect to my version of apple os x 10.5.7. And yes, I know that an old OS, but guess what, everything worked on it. It should be noted that in the sticky somewhere about the sdxc os x nightmare, if your not on the newest version of OS X, your sdxc won't be read, because only the newest lion version of os x supports sdxc. 32 GB cards are NOT sdxc right? there for mac os x users who don't want to be forced to upgrade can stay on their stable systems, and still use the failsafe patch.

There is no patch that will let you work will make sdxc files open on anything other then lion,

So I was forced to upgraded to lion, which I find no different then 10.5.7, but now some of my logic plugins broke, and crashes logic. But I can open up my files, and I am working, and not all was lost. But I figured that fast action performance would be theoretically be for my class 10 card, but its not.

@edubz

Sandisk Ultra cards fail at very low data rates -- much lower than those typical of FM. These cards are only really suitable for the stock firmware.

@edubz the 30MB/s Ultra is not so good, get the 30 or 45MB/s Extreme, for me it works very good, and very stable !!!!! Ultra 30MB/s is slower than the Extreme 30MB/s !!! i have tested it.

@Butt Nice beach video, I'm curious how you achieved such a mellow, low-contrast look on a bright sunny day?

omething special about the blues.

Yes I currently use it for underwater shots!

thx for the tips butt, im on it