If you have a GH2 (A cam) and GF2 (B cam) what frame rate do you plan to use?

Here are the options I have thought of:

1. Shoot both at 1080 29.97. Pros: A) DVD and Blu Ray encode at 29.97, B) Smoother pans. Cons: A) Hard to transfer to 24p for film and some film festivals. B) No footage you can use for nice slow motion YOUR OPINION?

2. Shoot GH2 at 1080 24p and GF2 at 720 60p (59.94). Pros: A) Nice 24p filmic motion from GH2. B) Drop GF2 720 60p footage into 24p timeline and it looks ok and you have slow motion possibility Cons: A) the 720 60p to 24p can sometimes look jerky/stuttery. B) Can't use the GF2 1080 res. YOUR OPINION?

3. Shoot GH2 at 1080 24p and GF2 at PAL 25/50 Does this work. YOUR OPINION? Potential Pros: Ability to use 1080 and 720 on GF2 and still match with GH2. What I have found so far is the PAL footage can look strange with certain lights on in NTSC countries. It sounds like a good plan because you only skip one frame in 1080 footage and only two frames if you use the 50p footage. YES/NO?

4. Final question, how do you plan to match footage color with GF2 and GH2, using same settings like -1,-1,-1,-1? using Flicker Red on GF2 setting to stabilize shutter at same speed set for GH2. (If you enable CINE style on GF2 you cannot use Flicker Red to set shutter). Possibly in post a simple S Gamma Curve with get GF2 to match GH2 Cine style.

MY OPINION: shoot 29.97 all the time. Very small percentage of indie filmmakers are actually making movies that go to theaters because its so competitive. Most films play in most film festivals that allow Blu Ray now (except for the big festivals but they allow you to transfer to Beta cam and other formats that allow for 29.97 or 59.94). And most films will go straight to DVD or Blu Ray and never be shown in 24p cinema. And if you get into TV or cable much better to have 29.97 which can also easily be put on a 59.94 timeline if need be (Premiere simply doubles the frames). And in my opinion vimeo.com handles 29.97 very well. So I am most likely going to shoot in 29.97 on both cams and, when needed, use GF2 as stunt cam at 720 60p which will easily convert to slow motion.

The only thing I do not fully understand is why 29.97 is said to be interlaced. When I drop both footages into Premiere Pro (I do not use Mac FCP or Pro Res bla bla) it renders out as progressive without any problems but am I missing something? Do I need to use Clip Wrap or something on all footage first before editing? In my opinion no but wanted to hear from everyone.

I think keeping the whole MTS file structure might be a pain, better to just rewrap them and then use "A better finder - renamer" to change the file names to something usable?

I guess, many do not come from cards directly but backups made on hard disks. Big surprise: With Mac and Windows-formatted disks the "Media Browser" will not allow to show files in the AVCHD-View option. When files are coming from a Dos-formatted disk (the disk I use is NTFS), the Media browser will automatically switch to AVCHD-view mode when you click a .mts file in the stream folder. Not before, i.e. when you click PRIVATE or any other folders. Spanned files seem to import correctly.

But on Mac-formatted disks, spanned files are not correctly imported, because AVCHD-View mode seems not possible...

So when you use a Mac product on location with mac formatted disks for backin up your cards, you seem to loose the ability to correctly import spanned files even on the Mac version of Premiere Pro 6....

However, I'm curious to know how it compares to Prores422 and would thus welcome comments from people who are familiar with ProRes and DNxHD.

A self-contained Quicktime file - codecs for HD: Apple Intermediate Codec, DVCProHD, HDV, Motion JPEG-A, Apple Pro-Res 4.2.2 (not HQ, LT, or 4.4.4), or H.264 (with a data rate of at least 16Mbps)

So I'm using my GH2 on a PC, rendering in Vegas Movie Studio HD 11.0, shooting 1080p 24fps

This is going to be shown a full-sized movie theater screen, so I want to maintain as much quality as possible. I wonder if there is any way of doing this without buying Quicktime Pro?

Thanks

I have found this potential solution, but I'm afraid I don't have a clear grasp of what all is going on (which I HATE. I'm the kinda guy that wants to understand how something solves the problem rather than taking it at face value and running with it.) Any insights into this issue would be very much appreciated.

Solution? I'll give it a try tomorrow. http://bitfilms.blogspot.com/2011/08/final-cut-exports-look-different-from.html

Seem to record without issue and playback in camera fine... Any ideas?

Vimeo's compression can't handle all of that noise, so please download a high bit rate version and 1080p samples at http://minus.com/mGH2_low_light_tests/1g

split screen original/denoised

0 s: 720/60p 50 Mbps, ISO 12800, 1/60 s shutter. denoised, decimated

12 s: 1080/30p 135 Mbps, ISO 12800, 1/60 s shutter. denoised, downscaled

23 s: 1080/30p 135 Mbps, ISO 6400, 1/30 s shutter. downscaled, denoised

36 s: 1080/15p 22 Mbps, ISO 3200, 1/15 s shutter. downscaled, denoised, interframe 2x

43 s: 1080/10p 11 Mbps, ISO 2000, 1/10 s shutter. downscaled, denoised, interframe 3x

53 s: 1080/10p 15 Mbps, ISO 12800, 1/10 s shutter. downscaled, denoised, interframe 3x

then repeats, full frame denoised

Part of these samples is simply a test of the trade-offs of high ISOs and long exposure times, with motion compensated frame rate conversion to boost the frame rate of the slow shutter speed samples.

For the noise reduction, I took the TemporalDegrain Avisynth script and rewrote portions of it to better deal with GH2 high ISO footage. Much of the effort was in getting the motion search to produce more accurate vectors in the presence of high noise. I was able to improve the motion search a lot, but it's not perfect. It often misses motion in large low-contrast areas of the image. The other work was to limit the differences between the de-noised output and the source, so as to reduce or hide ghosting artifacts from when the motion search was incorrect. This has a side effect of bringing back some of the noise. I was actually quite conservative about this, trying to keep the footage looking natural, and striking a balance that minimizes all of the different kinds of noise and artifacts. The noise reduction is purely temporal - i.e., accomplished by averaging pixel values across frames. Adding some kind of spatial noise reduction would probably help.

The script is extremely slow on full 1080p frames. To use it on 1080p, you'll need to find some way to divide up the frame and process the pieces in separate instances of Avisynth. 720p processing is not too slow.

There are lots of options in the script that I'll be happy to explain. There are only three or four options that you might want to change. The defaults (which I used for all of the samples) are optimized for 1080p at ISO 12800.

I compared my noise reduction output to that of RE:Vision Effects' DE:Noise plugin, and I think the script does a better job, though the plugin is much much faster.

Please post experiences and usage info for other motion compensated noise reduction software.

Is there any way to get the interlacing to stop?

Look at my attached photo to see the problem, you can clearly see it over and under the actors glasses. The weird part is that my GF1 does not cause these artifacts. In fact my GF1 produces higher quality and is more reliable footage than my GH1! (Both AVCHD and MJPEG!) How can that be? Shouldn't the GH1 have far better results than it's little brother? Clearly something is either wrong with my camera or the way I am patching it is wrong.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The first is the upsampled o/p from 720p50 footage to 1080p50 and the second is the native 1080p HBR frame grab

For example, just now I kicked off a render in Premiere Pro using the MainConcept CUDA H264 encoder. All six of my cores are at 60%, my disks are running at 25Mbps, my physical memory utilisation is 60% and my graphics card load is 20%. So where on earth is the bottleneck? None of these components seem particularly stressed, and certainly not max'ed out.

In this instance I suspect it could be the following:

• The CUDA enabled effects / encoder aren't using all the shaders on graphics card. Those that are being used are max'ed out
• The CUDA enabled effects / encoder are causing a lot of memory transfers to/from the graphics card which is the bottleneck

But these are both just guesses. Is there anyway to measure this? I'm using a PC with Nvidia GT460.

EDIT: I'd also checked to make sure that individual CPU cores weren't completely loaded.

Has anyone got any ideas?!

HDPro QT $1,495.00 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

... a self-contained SD Quicktime file with no proprietary codecs on either: - data DVD - USB flash drive miniDV playable DVD

I'm editing and rendering on Vegas Home Studio HD 11.0. I'm wondering if I should be changing the settings on the camera BEFORE even filming, to easier convert to SD..There are also so many output options on Sony Vegas that I'm at a loss on what the best transfer would be to maintain the best quality in standard definition. Wondering if a USB flash drive would maintain better quality than a playable DVD?...it seems like rather than forcing filmmakers to downgrade their finished product, the contest staff should be upgrading their equipment to handle HD...these are only 4-7 minute videos after all. The finished videos will be screened in a full size theater..something tells me they are going to look not so good.

Thanks for the help.

I'm planning to do a comparison of various video modes and shutter speeds and I'd like in the end to export one video that mixes thge following material:

• 24p footage @ 2fps that will be speed up 13x

• 24p footage @ 2.5fps that will be speed up 10x

• HBR30 footage @ 2.5fps that wil be speed up 12x

• HBR25 footage @ 5fps that wil be speed up 5x

How should I handle this in After Effects?

TIA.

I've got some computer generated video at 60 fps (and higher framerates up to 120 fps) which I would like to convert to standard 30 fps, with motion blur derived from blending the intermediate frames.

Specifically, my question is, is there an After Effects or (preferably) Apple Motion plugin that does this correctly? Or some utility software like MPEG StreamClip?

To be clear, I don't want to change the playback speed of the video, just blend intermediate frames to simulate footage shot at a lower frame rate and corresponding shutter speed.

thanks in advance

bruno

[edit] - on a hunch, I just checked the export options in StreamClip. There are "frame blending" and "better downscaling" options in the "Frame Rate" section. Does anyone have experience with using these for the purpose I described? Specifically wha's on my mind is, if downscaling a high frame rate video (e.g. 120 fps) to 30 fps, are ALL intermediate frames used in the blending? And in what proportion?

Basically a lot of people have noticed that the GH2s Black & White levels are at 16 and 235 respectively (ITU 709) and not at 0 and 255.

I personally use Sony Vegas and the histogram in Vegas show my GH2s mts files to have black levels at 16 and whites at 235. Others have noticed this too in Avid etc.

The discussion has been: is it deffinately so that that the GH2 records the levels at 16-235 or, is it the different programms which interpret those levels according to their own internl designs.

One important point is the GH2s own histogram. Try shooting with the lens cap on. Prior to pressing record the histogram will show levels to be at zero, but as soon as REC is pressed the histograms level will jump up a few notches (to around 16). In my case looking at the recorded black footage in Vegas or VLC will not show black but a very dark grey on an calliberated computer monitor (0-255). On a braodcast monitor the footage will be black. Also the waveform in Vegas will show the levels to be at around 16. Also the GH2s own histogram on playback will show the levels to be at 16.

(I have tried but can never get my levels to go above or below 16 and 235 in camera; but depending on which session settings I use in Vegas then the program will show the levels to be 16-235 or 0-255, hence the confusion and question.)

What are your findings? Is there any way to be certain exactly what levels are being recorded and not what individual software is making of the levels?

I'm using Windows and Premiere pro CS5. The same thing was on Apple and Final Cut.

Is there any solution to that? I must have PHOTO JPEG as an output.

Here is a sample picture: http://shrani.si/f/g/a5/vhSletJ/test-gh2.jpg

Thanks for the help