@driftwood I really miss my GH2 now. Would love to test out your latest settings!
Which lenses do you recommend by the way? I have the 14-140 now and want to buy a new kit the coming months and I prefer to buy 2 - 3 versatile primes for a good price with smooth manual focussing.
Hi @Sohus Shouldn't take too long to get your GH2 back, one of my 3 broke a few weeks back - it was hacked to death of course, and had a few dead EVF pixels, but I had it back inside 8 days with no questions asked ;-) The engineer was saying that theyve had a few cases where 'accidental touching of buttons during firmware update or/and with not fully charged battery' cause most the breaks ;-)
Lenses: If you can afford it, the Voigtlander 0.95 thats great, FD adapter to Cannon FD 85mm 1.2 or 55mm 1.2 and I must say I'm mighty impressed with some of the old Olympus OM lenses - especially the fast ones - I love the 50mm Macro f2 (rare) the 35mm f2 (fairly rare), the 50mm 1.2 and 55mm 1.2 are also quite excellent (but rare and expensive). OM to m3/4 adapters are in good supply on ebay. Also with an EOS to m4/3 adaper I got my Cannon 70-200 2.8L working nicely. Finally, the Panny Asphericals:- 7-14mm wide is brilliant and the pancake 1.7 20mm. Of course there's many other great lenses out there.
@driftwood (and those who want spanning) AQUAMOTION spans fine in any situation you need spanning (eg, event photography, stand up interviews, etc). I've used it now for 7 stand up interviews, some which fill up the entire sd card (sandisk extreme 32 gig). So don't kill yourself making a new setting -- just tell people to use this one. That said, if you're going to improve on Aquamotion, can't wait!
@JDN Good point mate ;-) @toxotis70@spanfreaks Even though AQuamotion was made for EX TELE and 80% Slow mode it does work for spanning on normal settings.
@driftwood Awesome work with 'SeAQuake'. 24p looks absolutely fantastic. With 60i I find I get cleaner video with FSH set to 42kbps, FH set to 35kbps, the 60fps frame limit set to the original default and a GOP of 6 or more. I don't know if it will be possible to ever get good looking 60i GOP 1 out of the camera as the frame limit has to be set so low muddying the fine details. In your patch description what do you mean by 1080i60 INTRA PsF, is it recording 30p progressive video within a 60i container?
@driftwood, can you please explain what you mean by PsF? I tested shooting with SeAQuake in 1080/60i, and it's regular old interlaced video: interlaced format video and interlaced encoding.
BTW, I have also had good luck with spanning under Aquamotion in 1080/30p. It's great. :)
I am planning to try one of your high bitrate/low GOP patches for shooting video using a octocopter. We shot a laser show for a client at night recently and we needed a higher iso value than 3200. Besides that I found that the "stock" image quality in video mode is quite ugly at 3200. So the next time (which is hopefully this month) I I hope I can improve our work using a hacked GH2. Do you think one of your patches is suitable for such a job? Of course, I will post the footage afterwards! Cheers, Tobsen
Its better to expose to the right. Thats mean, use the highest ISO - f stop you can , until highlight clipping. The image may be a lot brighter that yous eyes can see, but there will be less noise and you can lower exposure in post.
Hey guy's just shot this quick video with @driftwood requanted for the intro used magic bullet looks, and the rest ungraded haven't tried the new PTools yet, or the New patch yet. Lens 20mm f1.7 ISO 640 - 1250 Style Dynamic (-2,-1,0,-2) Custom W.B
@toxotis70, thx. I think that is what I did though. Still looked ugly in my opinion with the stock video mode.
@Driftwood, I did a quick test with your AQuarius2 patch and noticed a green band in the lower Third of the frame at ISO12800 in 1080p24 mode. Have you noticed that?
@toxotis70, this should be moved into another topic, but are you really advocating clipping highlights? Every DoP I've worked with underexposes by at least a stop -- golden rule of digital cinematography is never lose your highlights because you can never get them back. To avoid noise, use the highest bit rate, lowest ISO that will still allow you to expose properly.
@Tobsen -- Smooth -2,-2,0,-2 -- use a faster lense. I've shot by lamplight with my 1.4 and not much more with my 2.5 -- anything slower than that, you're going to get noise in low light because you're pushing the iso so high.. It's not the patch, it's the glass -- well, at least the grain. The green band thing, I don't know. Shooting with the fastest lens possible will also allow you to use a black frost to take away some of the edge and grain.
@JDN, maybe there is some confusion going on. Sorry for that. The ugly noise problem doesnt come from the hack patch, but from the stock settings. I know that a faster lense would be better, but we needed that stock lens for that shoot because it works with the internal stabilizer which is needed for some octocopter shots (reduces the vibrations coming from the rotors). But thanks.
Now the green band thing. I used the Voigtländer Nokton 25mm wide open at f0.95 so that is probably the fastest you can go. I didn't test every single ISO setting, but at ISO12800 there is a green band.
I'm assuming that is what you are talking about. I also have some banding issues on high ISO but I can manage them by using high contrast settings in the camera. Shooting in black and white also helps, as well as avoiding low contrast surfaces. (Banding becomes a lot less apparent when there is detail that breaks the banding patterns), and dissapears in the shadows. IMO highest ISO is mostly useful for creating a look that resembles 8mm film - and not a way to handle low light per se. (There is no substitute for proper lighting if one wants a clean image)
It has nothing to do with a particular patch.. although it's propably easier to fix in post with gop1. (if you want to)
@RRRR thanks for the info. Didn't see that thread.
Good advice with the contrast. Personally, I would never shoot at ISO12800, but I just wanted to see what the hack/patch is capable of. If it is a general problem, then sorry @Driftwood for thinking it was your patch.
@driftwood Your work is amazing!!! Since 'SeAQuake' was very very wonderful, I was surprised when I combined your Encoder settings with my patch. Super fine grain noise is fantastic BEAUTIFUL also in my 3GOPs! How can I understand this know-how? Supposing you do not care, I will make the "Driftwood Tune" version of all the my patches. :-)
that higher iso uses higher camera buffer, and that increases the writing time, or in this case, the bandwidth needed to flush to the sd what is inside the camera buffer
and _gl thinks that "probably due to the NR processing (higher ISO needs stronger NR)", so if the Noise Reduction can be really turned off, we will probably be able to have more camera buffer, to increase the quality,
so maybe the patches can be push even further if the noise reduction gets hacked