AFAIR this "rain" symptom is not at all the camera's fault, but a mis-interpretation of the H.264 encoded video by some playback software. Try replaying your raw .MTS files with a different software (e.g. a recent VLC) and see whether the symptom doesn't vanish.

So these are the new tests for 720p 60p

GOP 6 camera frezzes sometimes, recording stops sometimes, no matter the bitrate.

GOP 12 was stable in the first tests, but macroblocking starts to show in the shadows and there are texture lost in dark scenes, frame rate seems to become different, lower, in dark regions. Not pleasant to the eye.

GOP 8 seems to be the sweet spot, no significant macroblock in dark scenes, no significant texture lost, stable in first tests, needs more tests. Only issue I found in 3200 iso is near the objects edges the noise is more fine grain and in flat surfaces noise is more gross, but it is not anoying, not disturbing, and cleans ok with neatvideo, it is gone after denoise. In 3200 iso the texture is more fine near the I frames and more gross near the P frames, but this also goes away after denoise. (just I and P frames in GOP 8).

GOP 6 would be better, but I could not find a way to make it work, so GOP 8 is the best solution. I have the Sandisk 32GB SDHC 45MBps, I would like to try GOP 6 with the Sandisk 95MBps card... but for now I will do more tests with GOP 8.

5dtoRGB works ok for transcoding and I did not see diagonal pattern (rain) yet after transcoding.

I was thinking I would need to keep GOP number to close in each second, 60 frames have 10 GOP6, 5 GOP12, but there is 7,5 GOP8 inside a second of 60p, but this is no problem yet in the first tests.

SH was set to 128Mbps, H was set to 64Mbps, both worked ok until now.

It seems GOP 8 will be ok for 720p 60p, needs more tests... in different light situations, different objects textures and different motions, camera motion and objects motion...

I went through all this a long time ago. There's no need to re-invent the wheel. Check out the 720 60P in Sanity 5.1. The dirty work has already been done.

I loaded FM2.02 to the camera and did initial tests. It was stoping recording in SH and H so I did some changes and now it is working stable for me with amazing quality for 720p in low light and sun light. I tweaked the Flow Motion 2.02 to make it more stable in 720p 60p recording in my Sandisk 32GB SDHC 45Mbps card, no more stop recording until now, needs more tests. Texture is homogeneous and no macroblocking. I tweaked the 1080p 24p also. If you want to try it:

@apefos Thanks for taking a detailed look at FM2 and providing your modified settings for review. I'm busy with a project deadline this week, but will try to find time to test and compare your revisions with FM 2.02. A few initial observations:

• 1080p24 Low Top Setting & 1080p24 Low Bottom Setting - these FM2 settings are correct, they are involved in optimizing FM2's 24L 4GB file-spanning reliability at 60Mbps. Your boosted Video Bitrate 24L setting will probably have an adverse effect on this.

• Video Bitrate 24H & 1080p24 Frame Limit - Boosting these higher than FM2 settings may provoke reliability issues with 140Mbps Turbo mode and 30Mbps SD cards. If this is what required an Initial Quantizer setting of 18 in your revision, I'd consider that an undesirable compromise.

• 720p GOP Size 9 - FM2 uses a GOP size of 6 for 720p modes to maintain a keyframe rate of at least 8 per second in all video modes. Others may find lower keyframe rates acceptable, but this was an important motion-tracking optimization issue for me. In my testing, I was unable to find GOP-9 settings that produced 720p results verifiably more reliable than FM 2.02's GOP-6 patch.

When I test stability and reliability I shoot a green grass under sunlight with high speed shutter and I do movements with the camera, pan, rotate, zoom, to stress the codec. the shutter above 1/1000 is important to avoid motion blur and keep everything sharp when moving the camera, this way the codec will get stressed. The green grass under sunlight is the image which makes the Flow Motion 720p 60p GOP6 to stop recording and sometimes it freezes the camera, needs to remove and insert battery again. 720p with GOP 9 and other tweaks I did in FM202 solves this. The green grass is an image good for test settings in PTools because it strees the codec a lot and keep bitrate very high. If the camera can record the green grass for more than one minute with high shutter and movements, then the settings are ok for other images.

To test texture, noise and macroblocking I use to shoot a dark low light scene with different colors in image and some black things over light surfaces like inside walls, a room interior shoot. Also increasing the iso to 3200 helps to perceive how the codec handles the noise, texture and macroblocking. FM202 with GOP9 for 720p is working great for this with the tweaks I did. 1080p 24p also working ok.

It is amazing how FM202 shows the textures and noise, makes GH2 a new camera. Textures, noise, grain, low light, image details and high iso performance improves a lot. No macroblocking and the horizontal lines pattern in high iso is much less disturbing. Also there is no quality changing over time, same performance for I, B and P frames. Spatial and temporal homogeneous image for 720p and 1080p.

@LPowell did a great job in PTools advanced settings for Testers to improve the encoding performance. I am willing keep Flow Motion tweaked version in GH2 all the time. My tweaks are not optimized for spanning, just for stability, so I hope he can develop a balanced version between the original FM202 and the tweaks I did to make 720p stable and spanning at same time. But maybe spanning in 1080p is enough, because 720p is more usefull for short scenes with slowmotion in post production. So merging the 1080p 24p settings from the original FM202 version with the 720p 60p settings from the tweaked version can be a good mix.

@apefos gonna give it a test drive.. How is it in Landscape type shots, or infinity shots? You should post some test videos.

@apefos Yeah GH2 is such an amazing camera.. From your Patch which one is better GOP3, or GOP9 ?

Gotcha will try..

@Azo

It would be interesting you share your own changes. If you can, please upload the set ini file from your modified Flow Motion.

Thanks!

Here is another set ini I did, just changing the quantization back to the original Flow Motion value 17 instead of 18. Not tested yet.

@Azo

In my tests I perceived that the SH bitrate for 720p cannot be so much higher than the maximum showed in StreamParser for the green grass shoot. This is to avoid stop recording and camera freeze. Also GOP9 for 720p is the shortest stable gop I found.

So I just changed 720p from gop6 to gop9 and bitrate SH to 72000000 to improve stability. All other settings are form the original Flow Motion v2.02 I believe this is the first attempt to do the best of both worlds.

I did not change the 720p top/bottom bitrate limits, their range is different from the SH and H bitrate settings, I left this unchanged to try to keep spanning working. If camera stops recording in 720p you can change the "720p top setting" to 72000 and the "720p bottom setting" to 48000 or 55000. These settings are near the end of the set ini text file.

These are the settings I will keep in my camera, my latest modified Flow Motion. All resolutions and frame rates working ok (ntsc), no stop recording, no camera freeze. Great quality. Very stable, very reliable with the Sandisk 32GB SDHC 45Mbps card. Spanning was not tested. I hope there will be no more firmware changing...

Thanks.

did you test it with panasonic lenses?