@Stray I'm going to hack my cam tomorrow with you 88. Will there be any problem playing back in camera?

Actually thats a really timely question @pixcanfly. I wouldn't be surprised if in camera playback issues relate to the buffer size, which I've upped to 36000000. I did that just to make sure on other ppls recommendations, but IIRC the 88M was perfectly stable at the default video buffer setting. Will have a go testing that tomorrow. Don't let that put you off using it now pixcanfly, the setting as it is is very stable and the footage looks great. Oh, and only the 24H and 24L settings are solid and tested, the 720Ps and 1080is don't work on it.

@sohus Cheers, thanks for the test. I have done quite a good post test with a deep shot of trees in a strong wind which I've graded, then colour corrected the leaves over time (changing them to the autumn colours they should have, we're having weird weather here in the UK), applied adaptive contrast and then I've retimed the whole shot to be about 17% slower. It held up very well indeed, and the retiming didn't create any odd occlusion problems at all, which indicates to me that even with this low contrast shot there is enough information there to do a good job of it. There is quite heavy motion blur though as I shot it with a 1/50 shutter, and I also used a soft lens which wasn't the wisest set of decisions I made that day. Still it made the post test that little bit more difficult.

Edit: I know retiming a clip after colour correcting is a very wrong thing to do, but I'm in experimenting mode this evening.

@driftwood yeah, I don't usually have a problem. When I do though I find that after recording another shot that its cleared up and then every shot on the card plays back fine again. I don't normally have to do a switch off as well, but will bear that in mind. Frankly I rarely use the in camera playback, it doesn't actually tell you a hell of a lot on that screen about the recording anyway. I'm more likely to take my laptop along and look at it properly if I know I'm going to need some confirmation.

@rsquires Yes, sorry only the 24H and 24L (64M) settings are stable on that patch. If you find a 1080i and/or a 720P setting you like from another patch you could add them to that patch as they won't effect the 24p settings or each other. You'ld just have to copy all the 1080i and 720p related settings (including the ones in the testers section).

Edit : Saying that though the 720p settings work well on the 88M patch and are running at 24M.

I hope this patch comparison video is useful. The YouTube description has a link to the original mp4 file if you want to view it at full quality. I'm very interested to hear people's impressions.

cbrandin 66m GOP12 AQ2 1080p
cbrandin 32m GOP12 AQ2 720p
driftwood 132m GOP3 AQ2 1080p
driftwood 64m GOP3 AQ2 720p
mpgxsvcd 42m GOP12 AQ4 1080p
mpgxsvcd 32m GOP12 AQ4 720p
STOCK 24m 1080p
STOCK 16m 720p

I know that it would add a lot to the test if there was motion, but I'm still working on a way to have a motion comparison that is consistent and repeatable. I'll have to take a look around the house and garage and see what I can come up with =)

@Shield Spanning ? Chris's 44M AQ4 24L setting spans (32M). It also meets all your other requirements, except for the blip, even the stock setting has a small blip. You may not notice it though unless you do a lot of work on the clip. Its only the first 5-12 frames anyhow so just cut it off. The 1080i in Chris's 44M AQ4 is also stable, at 32M.

Some people will claim that other settings span, and if you're not shooting much detail so the current bitrate is quite low at the time it needs to span then it will. However, thats completely unpredicatable, so for now I think the 24L in the 44M AQ4 is the most reliable spanning setting.

Although I don't know vegas that well, if it can cope with mts files natively then you'll be fine there too. Actually, no hacked footage to my knowledge actually needs transcoding to another format before you edit with it (as long as your editor copes with AVCHD), it's just a workflow choice some people take.

As far as point 2 is concerned most of the settings posted now are stable under any shooting environment. All the long GOP settings are as far as I'm aware. You may find the AQ4 motion of the 44M patch isn't good enough, so you could lower it to AQ3 or AQ2, but then you may lose detail in lower lit areas of your image. Other than that you'll have to go up some in bitrate and lose the ability to span. >32M spanning problems are likely is it pretty much right now.

I'm using Premiere Pro CS5.5 for editing which can also edit AVCHD natively. I transcode using 5DtoRGB to Avid DNxHD if I want/have to do colour correction/grading work in Scratch (then export to DPX sequences) and compositing work in Nuke which often I'll use DPX or TIFF still sequences in, though I've recently started using DNxHD with Nuke too. My workflow changes depending on what I'm doing. Simple stuff I'll do entirely in Premiere.

Exporting from Premiere I use the H.264 codec mostly, there is no bitrate limit in Premiere with it (though again what codec/container I export in can change depending on where/who I'm delivering too). I just purchased the Mainconcept plugin for Premiere, so I'm currently working my way through it to create a series of export settings to use.

Topic will be closed soon, and series 2 topic will be started.

Another reason to transfer to an intermediate is to avoid the multi generation deterioration that can result from doing a lot of post work, which is why for compositing quite often the work is done with stills sequences, as well as it being a lot faster to work with.

I have no idea, I've never seen anything like that before. The only thing I can think of is the ETC mode, I seem to remember other patches having trouble with that mode, or I could be wrong. I never use ETC mode myself, so yeah thats something I haven't tested. Which is pretty crap of me, I forget entirely about the cameras ETC mode. There is no reason I can see why that shot would be difficult, even if it picked up the cutter blades they should just be a blur. Normally problems would show bad compression artifacts in the lower half of the frame, but this is the entire frame. Did you use ETC with other shots ? btw I've shot a lot with this patch on the same card as you (and slower ones too), so I don't think its card related, unless something went wrong with the card on this shot.

Anyone else have any ideas ?