I think the time mode is not accounting for the full bit rate from the I,P, and B frames. The settings I am using appear to allocate much more bandwidth to the I and P frames than it does to the B frames which appears to be the only thing displayed in the time mode.
You can check the file sizes for the exact same scene recorded with 24p and 720p. The 720p files are much larger and have MUCH less compression artifacts despite their large GOP(30 vs. 12). Those bits have to be going somewhere.
Can you post the settings file for your charts. Those look great. I was not getting the smooth cadence you are getting when I increased max bit rate. I would love to see what you did differently. Are those settings stable after you record a 1080p file?
I got the file to work and I am trying the settings now. I am afraid that your settings will adversely affect 1080p @ 24 FPS though. We shall see. Thanks for all of your efforts.
Yea I tried the settings and I got very uneven cadences for most videos. I did get 2 even cadences with a moderate average bit rate and very high max bit rate. However, the file was no better than stock. I still say a higher average bit rate and an even cadence is everything. It doesn't matter what stream parser says is the max bit rate.
For now I would just watch from the sidelines. None of the changes so far are completely reliable. Give us a week or two. There should be a lot of great progress in the next two weeks. By then we should be able to make simple instructions for what can be done with the hack.
We could make the instructions right now. However, they might change by the end of the day after further testing. They might even change the next hour. Progress is happening that fast.
Your settings affect all modes. The settings may not say that they affect 1080p. However, they do. I get an uneven cadence for 1080p, 1080i, and 720p most of the time with your settings. Do some more testing and you will see the instability of changing the max bit rate settings.
@mpgxsvcd "I get an uneven cadence for 1080p, 1080i, and 720p most of the time with your settings"
Are you talking about the HDMI output (regarding Cadence) or simply the recorded video... I think that EOSHD mentioned that the HDMI mode was either changed- or was able to disrupt video capture?
Has anyone gotten 1080/24p to show a higher AVG Bitrate in StreamParser? I'd be interested in seeing people's settings. Anything good on your end @EOSHD ?
Yes, higher. Not mega-ambitious but higher than I got in default 24Mbit. Here is latest findings. GOP size of 6 and aimed for 28mbit with PTools. StreamParser reports 5,040,000bit i-frames, GOP seems reliable (no odd results, stable). Average bitrate is 4-5Mbit higher than I was getting in standard 24Mbit mode.
Will share all PTools settings in a moment, just performing a 2nd tweak. See StreamParser results below.
OK I will now test same bitrate settings with standard GOP.
My theory was higher bitrate means less compression, lower GOP means more i-frames and so also less compression (but at expense of efficiency). Am I wrong Sir @Vitaliy_Kiselev? :)
Higher bitrate means less compression only if all else is equal. Lower GOP always means more compression if all else is equal. I-frames are worst in compression efficiency (charts on your screenshots show it visually). B-frames are best :-)
Thanks Vitaliy. Indeed image quality is not really much improved. Currently the bitrate settings only seem to effect i-frames and nothing else, meaning average bitrate and image quality stay roughly the same as default. After using standard GOP, average bitrate fell to normal levels again.
Had more mud with standard GOP 12 than low GOP 6 though.