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Pro: GH2 AVCHD encoder settings
  • 177 Replies sorted by
  • The second looks a lot worse than what I usually see out of the gh2. What settings do you use in concert with half gop? (is there any pulsing in bitrate?)
  • All very strange. Image quality seems to be going backwards with high bitrate settings. All quite different to the GH1. Not found any settings that really work yet.

    Also - strange bug - now 1080/50p recording ends immediately and instead of crashing camera resets AVCHD settings to whatever they were on last boot. Also, I have found my GH2 just changed my AVCHD folder name to lower case 'private' instead of PRIVATE. Like I say... VERY ODD!!

    All my current settings attached.
    sete.ini.zip
    940B
  • @ EOSHD

    In the pics you included GOP6 looked far and away better than GOP12. How does that compare to the unhacked firmware settings?

    Just throwing an idea out there as people seem to be reporting the same issue that when you increase the bit rate the quality suffers. Is it possible that when we are increasing the bit rate that we are increasing a denominator. That the standard values yield a coefficient that is used in determing the real values and that lowering them would actually increase them.

    I don't know enough to even get started testing myself. Just throwing it out there trying to help.

    Thanks guys for all your efforts.
  • @ELAW I'm too chicken to start testing with my GH2, but I love your creative thought process - everyone busily assuming that increasing the rate does what we might expect. I wonder if anyone has tried reducing it?

    Absolutely agree on what you say about the two pics. Grass and trees are great subjects to show up mud.
  • I just donate, it's the second time. good luck and work Vitaly and all you guys!!
  • Green subjects with plenty of detail stress codec since green channel contains the most detail and the sensor is actually engineered with bias toward green light wavelengths. So trees, grass, perfect to make muddy, like football player does :)
  • just got an additional result for 720p60 with ptool set bitrate to 56000000 and GOP=30, extended videobuffer to 3 Mio

    video at:



    streamparser303.jpg
    1180 x 369 - 141K
    mediainfo304.jpg
    434 x 559 - 52K
  • Hey daidalos,

    could you attach your settings? are they stable in those high detail scenes?
    I tested mpgxsvcd settings and everytime I panned to trees, the camera freezed with cardspeed error.
    I use a sandisk extreme pro 16GB (45MB/s)
  • hey, settings are in "path" of mpgxsvcd-settings, i had no any freezing yet, of course must first shot a 24p, even not turning off camera for only changing card (here SANDISK 45MB/s), set 24p to C1 and 720p to C2, then you can change quickier, think, there are more potential better settings, but we must (slowly?) understand, what happens


    settings007.jpg
    437 x 732 - 90K
  • @Angry_C Extreme pro is an SDHC UHS type I card is not supported by GH2 at its the full speed. GH2 supports SD spec 2 and UHS 1 cards are SD spec 3. SO GH2 will have a limited support for them. From an anecdotal, not very scientific testing I can tell that GH2 reads and writes UHS 1 cards at about 10MBps max.
  • Thank you,
    I set the 720p60 gop size to 15 an Maybe a reason for freezing, now testing gop size 30.
  • @daidalos Looks good, one problem: the frame following an I-frame is of a very poor quality, especially in a shadows; it results in a somewhat strobe-y effect with a visual hiccup twice a second. Anyone else sees it?
  • @dkitsov

    oh my god, does that mean that i bought 2 of these expensive cards for the trashcan and my old transcend class 6 is faster in the gh2 than the sandisk extreme pro?
  • yes, i saw it, we must work further, ok card-problem i will eliminate with changing to class10 and repeat it tomorrow, but saw no degrading posts for UHS.
    i try now bitrate changings between 28 und 56MBit...tomorrow
  • @daidalos

    Please, remove settings from message body and put them as attachment.
    Otherwise it is makes topic hard to read.
  • @Angry_C That's what I did. Just ordered a 30MBps class 10. I think at this point the only camera that supports USH 1 is Nikon D7000...
  • @Angry_C ...but let us not talk about the SD cards in this topic, or we will learn the wrath of Vitaliy...
  • @Angry_C I am not sure I understand the reason you posted a link to a cellularfactory...
  • Found some new behaviour from 1080/50p mode, I can now get a clean live-view display at 50fps when the record button is hit, but no AVCHD file is written to the card and a battery pull is necessary for camera to respond to button presses. But the display video is perfect and clean, not gambled like before.

    I have changed some of the mystery 1080i/p encoder settings for this to occur. If anyone can download these settings and explore what they find, it might be useful.

    It may be that one or two of these control what the live-view and HDMI output format is? Obviously AVCHD encoding itself still broken by the 1080/50p setting though...
    sete.ini 2.zip
    950B
  • By one setting at a time elimination I've found that it's Encoder setting 4 1080i that's responsible. When changed from default 17 to 1, it has effect of disabling recording to card and the camera stays in normal live view mode. It is as if AVCHD encoder is never activated when record button pressed, there is no gamma shift like normal, or record symbol. However following that the camera can no longer be operated, doesn't respond to button presses or power switch, needs battery pull. This setting effects 24p mode not just 1080i mode.

    With Encoder setting 4 1080i set to default 17 and camera in FSH Creative Movie Mode, I get Card Speed Error (CSE) with my current 1080/50p PTools patch settings and a zero kb MTS file is written to the card. On very very low detailed scenes like completely blurred background I get the usual corrupt MTS file written, with half macro blocking and half complete trash :)
  • @dkitsov

    I posted it, because there is a list of compatible Panasonic cameras;-)

    The Sandisk extreme 45MB/s is a little faster than the sandisk 30MB/s or the Transcend Class 10, also in a GH2. The writing speed is near 20 MB/s. But no more posts here about sd cards, we can open a new thread.
  • I don't think we need to concentrate on SD cards at this moment. 30MB/s is enough
  • @EOSHD Maybe I'm on the wrong way, but I had a look at Encoder settings 4 in binary mode.
    0000 1001 (9) 720p
    0000 1000 (8) 1080p24
    0001 0111 (17) 1080i
    So maybe bit 4 and/or 5 swiches interlaced/progessive mode?
    And if you set them to 0 (0000 0001 (1)), nothing will be recorded.
  • Very interesting. Trying 8 via HDMI