@mo7ies & others,

Because of the wheater that day (little contrast) the subjects you mentioned may look a bit sharper with stock S+1. All hacks give the GH2 a more filmic look and therefore less blocky contrasty vid-like. I will experiment further with S(harpness) in the patches. Personally i like vibrant -2, 0, -1, -2 a lot.

afeter many hacks i came to the following:

For lowbitrate/high image quality use @Ralph_B Sanity patches or Cake latest patches from @balazer @driftwood 's Cluster V2 has yet to be released (= low mbs/high gop settings)

For medium mbs. settings the best are the latest natural, gop3zilla or golgop patches from @bkmcwd

Happy shooting!

@thepalalias

I've done astronomical cinematography with the GH2, too. Here's a neat trick for recording the stars:

Set variable movie mode to 300% and shutter speed to 1/8. Now you're letting in 3 times more light than a 1/25 shutter and 6 times more light than a 1/50 shutter. The resulting movie will playback at triple speed, but each frame will be unique - no duplicates.

@mo7ies Thanks!

@Ralph_B Great (or in my case, lucky ;) minds think alike.

I did the same thing in wider moon shoots in the past where I wanted to see the clouds. Except usually I decimated half of the frames in post to preserve the 180 degree rule (so it played back 6 times faster instead) or limited myself to 1/15. It's part of the reason that "bus goes by" worked well in the intra demo last year. For extreme telephoto there is too much motion blur but it works well with wide angle shots (stars, clouds, etc.) If anyone else hasn't tried it yet, they really should.

I've also found it is especially useful when I have low-motion scenes with human subjects because of the way the low ISO and additional exposure helps keep the skin smoother. I've had some great actors in that respect, some of them even working with me shooting full-on timelapse intervals.

But on this shoot, I had the opposite problem - too much light.

What are some of your favorite kinds of astro shots with the GH2?

Tony, can you try 14-42 outdoors at widest (14mm) at midday, and let me know whether you are getting any weird romb-like spots in the video? I went through TWO lens copies with the same defect. Are they all like that?

Downloaded "original" video file from Vimeo - 36MB version - and its' 720p and has huge macroblocking artifacts (beige wall, white paper...)

This can't possibly be coming from GH2 + Sanity5 ?

I've been using Sanity 5 for the last few days and have been extremely impressed with the quality per file size.

Here's something I put together of a butterfly that seemed in bad shape and couldn't fly, set to some dramatic choral music:

Shot in VMM 80%, Vibrant (-2,-2,-1,-2), with the 14-42mm and a Nikon 85mm 2.0 AI.

It's hard to really see the quality from the youtube compression, so I've uploaded an original mts clip here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23922406/Butterfly%20027.MTS

OK,

Reuploaded my test but this time I graded in AE with ColorGhears (CineGamma, Tone w/Saturation)

I also tried some different settings in Premiere for the render so let me know if it's better or worse.

If anyone can give me some insight into the best H.264 render settings out of Premiere on a Windows box, I'd really appreciate it.

Tony

@tcarretti Why don;t you ask the staff at Vimeo. In their usual helpful way, they'll point you to a Faq that explains the way to get the WORST video possible. (deliberate jab at the Vimeo staff)

Tony, just make a custom Export setting in PPro as follows, it will work for YouTube, Vimeo etc etc: H.264 Profile High, Level 3.2, 1080p at your framerate, Widescreen (16:9) Progressive, VBR 1 Pass Target 4.0kbps Max 6.0Mbs , square pixels (1:1), Render at Max Depth Checked, Use Maximum Render Quality Checked, Keyframe 1 frame, Audio: AAC 44.1kHz 64 kbps Stereo.

http://primehd.com/encode-for-vimeo-youtube.htm

@Mike_C On my system, it defaults to Level 3.2 and I never had a reason to investigate/change this setting any further. All of the settings I posted are equally applicable to 720p renders. (Personally, I prefer to render/upload non-critical online demos as 720p WMV, not MP4s, but hey it's just my workflow.)

Keyframe simply syncs video with audio at the interval you set. So Keyframe = 1 would lock audio with video at each frame. Keyframe = 24 with 24p video would lock it at 1 second interval. Usually it is considered OK to lock it at 1 sec because no audible drift would occur over such short interval, thus a recommendation to use Keyframe setting equal to the particular video's framerate. Don't worry about it too much, it will work :)