Uploaded it today and shot some things before dark:
The focus and the brightness is a little off, so forgive me! I also was shooting on Smooth (all -2, except color, which was 0) with high shutter speed, low ISOs, and high blue and green white balance. Why? 'Cause no one else did it.
Congratulations release of FM2! :-) Since my main PC has crashed now, I have not studied many tips yet, but it is very interesting.
"Since GOLGOP3 and GOP3ZILLA never aborted for me in 720p60 mode"
Which version is what you show here? Although I am testing 6GOP again now, if 9GOP in 60p is better than 6GOP, have you judged?
I got two failures doing a basic timing test. I wanted to see if it would span on standard Class 10 cards. I used a Transcend class 10, 16gb and just pointed it at my LCD Tv while I watched a movie so the screen filled the image.
The first time it failed after around 15min with write speed error. I immediately reformated the card like a boob without seeing the vid. Second failure after the format, it recorded for around 20 min and spanned twice but didn't go past the second span. This was at 60i and iso 1600 and the exposure meter was almost at the +3. Then I tried 24p at lower iso but ran out of card. All and all it recorded around 35min total on 16g.
I'll try a only 24p test next and a test on a 533x Pretec card after that with more standard exposures.
EDIT: At iso 500 and slightly overexposed to slightly underexposed depending how the TV picture changed, it spanned at 24p and recorded just under 35min on Transcend, class 10, 16gb.
I've had FM2 on my GF2 for the last two days and the very first capture, high detail foliage/trees during last evenings 'golden hour', endured 2-seconds and stopped with an error message. i don't own an AF lens, so I'm all manual focus. After this initial error, the camera has operated flawlessly with about an hour of capture time, handling everything that I've thrown at it. I'll continue testing, however it's been a very positive experience, so far.
I think it may be the lenses that's pushing it over the edge. I only use primes and hit FM2 with everything I could think of today.
Video out of the car window in the highway, panning my river ripples in bright sun, even the sorghum field with tens of thousand little white flowers on green stalks with bees and butterfly's in the wind.
It's not an ultra high bitrate patch. It didn't go over 80 today no matter what mode, I tried... 720 60, 1080 24, HBR, TE on and off and it didn't flinch plus, it spanned perfectly. I shot the sorghum field for 15 minutes in 720.
Other than the normal GH2 green tint, I have no problems with it.
I repeated my "moving tree leaves in the sun"-test with FM 2.0 in 720p60 today, using a SanDisk 64G 95 MB/s card.
The resulting bitrate was ~67MBit/s on average. IQ looked very good, but not visibly better than the samples I had recorded with GOLGOP3 and GOP3ZILLA, earlier (which had an average bit rate of ~50 MBit/s).
Alas, recording using FM 2.0 stopped after several seconds to minutes, usually when the wind became stronger (so the leaves would present a larger amount of motion).
Since GOLGOP3 and GOP3ZILLA never aborted for me in 720p60 mode, I guess I will try to merge its 720p60 settings with the 1080p settings of FM 2.0.
(I did not try p25, p50 or interlaced modes, as I don't use them at all.)
@towi : I did flash back to FW 1.0 without incrementing in Ptool, just the original 1.0 FW copied directly on the SD card, then upgraded to 1.1 without using Ptool again. Then flash to FlowMotion 2.0 and format the SD card. Did you made the same? Sorry if it doesn't work for you...
@safari Here it is http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/330/new-gh2-firmware-leak
thanks for the tip!
Unfortunately it doesn't work for me (still the same issue).
These changes seem to work fine for PAL modes (HBR/25p, FSH/50i, SH/720p50) after initial tests.
Video Bitrate FSH/SH=96000000
1080i50 GOPx2=12
1080i Top Setting=92000
I'll start to actually test the settings now. From first impressions I'd say FM2 looks damn good!
I think I've found as solution for preventing the crashes (PAL user)
I've tried all the situations where it crashed yesterday (SH and HBR daylight with a lot of details), and it works like a charm now, no more crashes until now :-) No problem too with Towi's death chart.
I'm curious to know if it works for you? Hope that helps.
"I haven't been able to provoke any recording failures so far in any of the PAL video modes. If you're seeing repeatable failure patterns using freshly formatted SD cards, I'd need a detailed description of your test procedure in order to reproduce the problem"
I've shot a (picture-filling) codec torture chart (see attachement) off a monitor. High contrast (histo clipped in the blacks and the whites). This is the very first test I run with new settings. Normally this test is a little less demanding than shooting a highly detailed landscape scene in daylight. This is why I think it's a good starting point.
Lens = Zeiss 2.0/50 at f4. Camera settings = ISO400 / Smooth (-2|-2|-1|-2).
I am still tweaking the settings... I went back to your original GOP-Table for 50i (2, 2, 2, 2, 24, 24) and it works fine in conjunction with these two modifications: 1080i50 GOPx2=12 / 1080i Top Setting=92000. I now try to increase the 1080i Top Setting again a little bit ... but the 95000 in your original setting definitely seems to be too high (repeated write speed errors on SanDisk 30MB/s and 95MB/s cards).
As to the GOPx2 length... for interlaced modes the default is twice the fields count for each GOP. Default GOP length for 24p/50i is 12GOP; the respective GOPx2 setting = 48. So I think for 3GOP the 1080i GOPx2 setting should be set to 12 (instead of 6). At least I use this pattern in several settings without issues.
Hope this helps ...
I did use the "A" exposure mode, don't no if that had anything to do with it.
stupid that i not was thinking about changing that in the field, i shoot always in PRE AF with C-AF.
@LPowell the freezes becomes when i set my lens to 35/55mm or 135mm, and change fast from detail to nothing or visa versa.........weird.......
Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 14-150mm 1:4-5.6
Im going to the Cayman Islands next week and will try the patch out there. Should gets some amazing footage I think.
I used 2.0 for a shoot today and had no errors and everything went fine even with 60p and 24p
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