At this point I don't think its a Vegas issue, because rendered from the Vegas timeline uncompressed it didn't change the image. I'm going to mess with it more and see what I can find out. At home I have a older version of Vegas, at work I have the newest version.. I'll do come comparisons between the two. Still shocked that XDCAM at 35mbps (highest setting possible in Vegas) accentuated it that much.. but I guess we are going from 50mbps to 35mbps.. some generation loss is expected.

@pdlumina, yes agreed, my shock was how badly the render to XDCAM added to the blocking.. mostly shocked because XDCAM is widely used and fairly trusted format.. As I said, doing uncompressed renders from the timeline didn't change the source image, blocking is very minimal in the source and uncompressed, but the XDCAM render made the blocking far worse. I think I'll use XDCAM renders to find flaws now, instead of render for the web. :) I messed with some MainConcept CBR settings and think I found a winner for high bitrate yet compressed renders.

Agreed Pdlumina, one small change I made was it wasn't anamorphic, but 1:1 original frame size Either way yes mpeg4 is going to be more efficient for quality vs space used for any same file size.. But still shocked how badly xdcam trashed it in that area that was blocking.. Otherwise detail was good in the xdcam formated render.

But enoght with this render format talk .. Time to keep testing and shooting.

AndyS, yes Vegas does but the files would be way to big for internet upload with limit like 2gb on youtube 1gb on facebook etc.

However to put this blocking issue to bed.. the attached image is a UNCOMPRESSED render still from vegas.. this is as good as the original, blocking is present but very very minor in the sky.. Vegas isn't destroying anything and when rendered to XDCAM HD the XDCAM codec went totally when bonkers on the blocking, and made it far worse. That made me paranoid and seeing blocks in everything I looked at .. yes there is blocking in the original footage in this extream shot, but its very minor.

Mysteron .. no spanning.. no good for me.. on to something else.. Footage looked nice.. if you can deal with every clip under 6 minutes... but a good test to see how fast the GF2 can write data.. 85mbps.. not bad

Is PVDOG now smooth and stable on 720p? (I understand it does not play back in camera).

I also tried SpanMyB**chUp... but it didn't span.. but I'm not on confirmed working class 10 cards, liek the 30mbps sandisk. I'm on Transcend class 10..

for me spanning is a must have

It was reported that Sedna was spanning in 1080 and 720 on gh2.. so I figured id try it..Trying Sedna q20 seta now, no spanning on 1080i, trying 720p to span now... If that works may be a nice combo, 720 for long shoots 1080 for clips under 6-8 minutes.. We shall see if it sans at 720 .. The footage was nice at 1080 had that intra look/feel very nice. My 1080 test clip went 9 minutes before it hit 4 gb and tried to span and didn't, but didn't corrupt the file or anything.. Well 720 just attempted and failed to span.. Didn't work.. Back to pvdog I think..

PVDOG is the dog for me.

Rambo, I'll try that next. , I put cake v2.0 on now , since that is the birthmother to pvdogs patch.. testing spanning.. but takes a while on lower bitrates to get to spanned, But I have lots of footage of my sons gold fish swimming around his aquarium now.. lol :) Ill try flomotion next.. What i want to do is find a few i like then load a few cards up with patches and go test them all on the same toucher scene of the lake and sky that started blocking pvdogs patch.. a scene like that is hell on any setup.. see what hold up best. I'm still happy with pvdogs patch.

Cake 2.0 spans, looks nice.. I'll do the lake test on this one for sure..

BTW if you don't need spanning Mysteron looks amazing on the GF2 try it out! When my GF3 body gets here I may just dedicate that to Mysteron for short shot stuff. I was looking at the test footage from it on the GF2 nice stuff.

Batteries are flat, cant patch any more till they are full.. more tomorrow hopefully .

pdlumina, you should share a config file for that combo, others may want to use it.

Will do, left the ini at my work's comp. I'm just going to go ahead and say that for $250, what we have here is a very capable 1280x720 progressive machine. Superb image quality, easy to edit, suitable for broadcast, and upscales beautifully on 1080 displays.