I spent a lot of time with Cluster V2A and Flow Motion V2,1 last night and more of today. I need to work on it a lot more..... then do the same to Cluste 2e.

Image wise in perfect conditions they both seem about the same, Flow Motion seems to have deeper colors for the same settings. Since I do nearly 100% run and gun, performance in various conditions are key factors. At night, Flow Motion seems a lot cleaner but I think it's because it's crushing the blacks. Today while grabbing a few quick shots under a shelter, there was a lot of noise with Flow Motion and there shouldn't have been.

So..I need to sit down and strip some channels in order to figure out what's going on. The daytime footage of Cluster 2A in the shelter is very clean.

v2f will just turbocharge v2e with its auto quant set to 4 (more to details) since GOP6 as a GOP is quite underpowered... Its an ages old aid developed by cbrandin to maintain low Q attempts on the fly.

@driftwood, I think i'm going to print a t-shirt with the beginning of this page. Congratulations. Thank you for everybody's work. Your are really generous.

I don't think there would be any advantage to having a quantization value of less that 4, after factoring in the scaling tables. A quantization value of 4 produces 255 possible levels, which is the most an 8 bit codec can represent. Quantization values lower than 4 really only offer an advantage with 10-bit codecs.

@driftwood. Nick, I have always been a fan of Sedna A Q20 setting for 24P and I agree that nothing beats GOP1 for 24p. I have been using a Sedna A Q20-Sanity hybrid for a while but I like what I see in Cluster v2e for 1080i/HBR/720p. I was contemplating to do a Sedna A Q20-Cluster V2 and a Sedna A Q20-FM 2.01 hybrid which you call it Crossfire now. I think you can do a much better and thorough job of it than I can. When can I expect the Crossfire setting for Sedna-Clv2? I am willing to be an early adopter and test it.

@Driftwood Thanks for organizing your settings/patches so neatly. That's a lot of patches and work! Thanks, very much!

Try v2e for PAL.

Thanks @peternap Try and test v2e too. Version 3 is in progress to try and balance the memory which gets allocated to P/B frames - which incidentally I have found the more you power them, the more the i frames drop... balancing the available memory gets everymore tricky... :-)

@Frame Shoot the same stuff against stock and try v2e too. You PAL land ?

@karl On a lot of the newer GOP1 settings the only way you're going to get crashes is if the sd card is either not good enough or fragmented. Seriously, youre missing out. :-)

PS How did you get on with Cluster v2? That will understress most decent type 10 cards and still retain good quality at 24p, 30p and 60p... etc...

@driftwood: Regarding your statement "if you want the best, stick to GOP 1 on 24p": Is there any GOP1 setting that will not abort recordings or crash the camera while still delivering quality better than the best current GOP3 settings?

I wonder because the only thing I do is documentary stuff, and unlike at a feature film set, I cannot ask the "actors" to do a re-take when something goes wrong. Also, when shooting underwater, unpowering the camera is simply not possible.

Therefore, a GOP1 setting would be useful for me only if it was known not to abort or even crash.

@driftwood What can we expect from the crossfire settings?