Just this morning I got my new Sandisc extreme (without "pro", 30 MB/s), and made some short tests - recorded Mpeg video @ 180 Mbit... Haven't done any thorough comparitive testing (with controlled camera speed), but when I compared 2 screenshots of the same scene with about the same camera motion speed (720p AVCHD with mpgxsvcd's settings vs. High bitrate Mpeg), there wasn't much difference in resolution. The Avchd was darker though, so I have more shadow detail in the Mpeg (apparently not depending on environmental light changes).

@Mimirsan, I have good results for 720p with mpgxsvcd's settings: when filming scenes with high detail, average bitrate even shoots up to 31Mbit (Stream parser: Average Total Bitrate = 33.402.929) - only afaik you can only use them, when recording 1 sec of Fhd first... But I can live with that :-)

PTool 3.61D is coming soon.

With big breakthrought.

I think 1080p 24fps is the main use for dslr filmmaking. Even if it is decent on the gh2, I think most would like it to be better. If you intend to do some grading etc. the files does break up quite easily. Now the glaring fault like no 25 fps, low 720p bitrate, are also very important but should not negate the 1080p 24fps one.

@Sage
"24p bitrate the goal"
Isnt there already a decent 24p out of the box?
Im more hoping for decent workng stable 25p,higher bitrates for other filmmodes and possible HDMI improvements are the goal.


Great news on the progressive patches...look forward to giving them a test

Thank you Vitaliy.
It is critical that the hack go deeper to have any further progress (24p bitrate the goal).
Considering you're going into the quantization, perhaps we might one day do 10bit! ;)

This weekend I used the GH2 hack (720p 28mbps) for the first time on a film. One odd little thing I noticed was that the nle (cs5.5) was doubling frames randomly toward the beginning of the 720p file. It was very weird behavior... I assume the hack affects i/p/b frame type tagging or something along those lines. (it gets in sync after the first few seconds) So for the time being, I'll be recording a few seconds before the take begins. I don't know if anyone noticed anything similar? Anyway, here's a preview of the film, the hacked 720p starts it off:

Btw, I changed progressive patch including bunch of internal encoder settings under the hood. During limited testing it looked pretty ok, no hangs.
But either sensor mode is actually 60i or picture is processed before encoder or we don't understand something yet. So, we have same garbage in the bottom half.

Today I got an error message about NTSC/PAL problem. I have a PAL GH2 which I switched to NTSC(sometimes it seems I´m the only one here who wants 720p60 for fluid playback on monitors...).
I filmed some scenes with 720p60, then suddenly I got an error about incompability of camera and card due to PAL/NTSC settings. After switching the camera on and off the problem was gone.
Anybody else had this problem?
For me it would be no problem to have a "fixed" PAL to NTSC conversion like in the earlier versions of PTool because I don´t need PAL framerate, really. Maybe the switching in the menu can cause sometimes troubles.

anyone test out the AGC settings yet? if I wanna disable it do i set AGC 0 setting to 0??

I invested significant time and effort to look at the AVCHD encoder last days.

As result, PTool v3.61D will be coming soon.
It'll include tuning of so called "internal encoder mode" introduced in GH2 (for example, 1080p24 has its own mode code that is calculated inside encoder).
And many parameters tuning will be added also.

P.S. I'll be cleaning this topic leaving only really useful posts.
No hard feelings, ok? Just to make it more readable.

So if im reading correctly...he's going to post the exact settings when he figures out a way to make it more stable? Sounds fishy

anybody would like to try my old 400 24 settings that i use on the gf1, i get 100 mbits stable on class 10 and still use it nowadays with no problems.
all Q settings: set to 400
all T settings: set to 24
i dont have a gh2, but should be a good starting point

here is some more info on the 400 24 shot on a GF1

"Chris will be participating in GH2 project. "
Chris Rocks! Great news.