Following up on Driftwood's recommendation below, I shot a test comparison of his Cluster v4 patch with Flow Motion v2. For this shot I used a handheld Leicasonic 14-50mm f2.8-3.5 OIS lens in 1080p 24H mode. Here are links to each video, which include downloadable original MTS files:

Cluster v4 in 1080p 24H mode:

Flow Motion v2 in 1080p 24H mode:

Cluster v4 is indeed a high-quality long-GOP patch, with peak bitrates up to 100Mbps. However, its P and B-frames are encoded with average quantization levels that are coarser than the B-frames in Flow Motion v2.

Using Elecard StreamEye to examine the original MTS files, average QP level of the macroblocks in each Cluster B-frame is about 28. If we combine this factor with the average of the first four entries in Cluster's B-frame Quantization Table, we can calculate a good estimate of the average quantization quality used to encode the frame. For Cluster v4, this averaged table value is 8 and combining it with an average QP level of 28 produces an effective quantizer of about 8.1 (lower values produce finer quantization quality).

In the Flow Motion v2 case, the average QP level of macroblocks in each B-frame is 20. The average of the first four entries in the FM2 B-frame Quantization Table is 11. Combining these factors produces an effective quantizer of about 4.3. These figures indicate that Flow Motion v2 B-frames are encoded at a quantization quality nearly twice as fine as Cluster v4 B-frames. OTOH, the FM2 MTS file is nearly twice as large as the Cluster v4 file.

Here is an unfiltered frame grab from the above videos displayed at 200% magnification. The Cluster v4 frame at the top looks very good, with no visible macroblock artifacts. However, its limited bitrate was not able to capture quite as much flowing water detail as the Flow Motion v2 frame below it.

@LongJohnSilver @LPowell

From what I see on vimeo, its not only the water in the bottom of the frame, but also the distant water in the middle. There is rain/insects hitting the surface randomly producing small circular waves. If you look close enough you can see that the footage jumps in time in that area (about 1/2 second).

(I hope its not the vimeo compression/playback thats fooling me here;-)

@LongJohnSilver Your second video is not as intensely detailed as the first, and FM2 recorded it in its standard 100Mbps mode. Both Stream Parser and Elecard StreamEye Slim reports look flawless, indicating that the encoder was operating at optimal quality levels as intended. (The target QP level for Flow Motion v2 is 17 for both I-frames and B-frames.) With an all-Intra patch, you'd need a bitrate of over 175Mbps to maintain comparable encoding quality in each of its I-frames.

@LongJohnSilver The left edge of the frame looks like it's illuminated in bright sunlight, which narrows its contrast. That makes it look less detailed that the darker areas of water. At the distance this video was shot, the water surface ripples are tiny, making them look more like random noise than genuine image details. Perhaps this scene would look more cinematic with a diffusion filter?

@driftwood Thanks for the suggestion. I uploaded a comparison between Cluster v4 and Flow Motion v2 in 1080p 24H mode in the first post on this page.

@LPowell , can FH quality mode be modified for lower bitrates (1080i 50) ? , I would like to get about 2h 15m on 32GB card ? If it can be done without interrupting other settings please let me know where can i change them ? Same for 720p mode the H ?

@LPowell Is that the 12/15 GOP, 6 GOP or 3GOP variation of Cluster v4 in your images? Your results differ from my own tests! Also Im interested just to see if the classic GOP structure can handle thee 'scene' that Longjohnsilver is having problems with.

Lee your tests are NOT equal either. Checkout the sunlight on the top video against your shot. So much more highlights in the recorded picture on mine. Please redo your tests. In fact I will do my own comparison this wknd. Ill be taking 4 GH2s down with the same lenses.

@LPowell , thank you, i lowered FH/H to 32, it works great when more card space is needed. I got 2h7min :-)

@jrd: Regarding: "Surely somebody is editing native Flowmotion 2 24p footage and can comment on time-line responsiveness?" - Well, I do, and I can comment, but I am not sure whether this is of any help to you, as you might be using a completely different hard- and software for editing.

I can say that using kdenlive and avidemux26 on a dual core i7 CPU with HD4000 GPU (mobile) or a Phenom X4 960 with a GeForce 8800 GPU (desktop) I am satisfied with the responsiveness of the timeline with GOP1, GOP3 and GOP9 material.

Well...uploads aren't going well. I had a ten second clip that I uploaded to Exposure room but I got: We're Sorry, there was an Error Attempting this Operation Insufficient system storage. The server response was: 4.3.1 Unable to accept message because the server is out of disk space.

That upload took 6 hours so I compressed it and sent it to You Tube.

Anyway, it worked out really well on rough seas. This was still in harbor.

Hi everyone, I thought i would give the latest Flow Motion a go with a couple of adjustments and it does seem to hold on quite well where I was having problems with Sedna Q20 before at Manual Movie Mode at ISO12800.

With this, I somewhat changed the GOP to 1 on Manual Movie, HBR and Cinema modes and it's bitrates to 100M (Highbitrate) and 50M (Lowbitrate). This as I said holds up quite well for a good few minutes at that ISO but my problem comes when trying to play them back (even after normally stopping record) I get an error message saying that this motion video cannot be played back but it is readable on the PC.

This is quite frustrating that I cannot even preview the video files that I have just recorded. Does anyone know why perhaps? Forgot to mention, this was all done on a 16GB 95Mbit/s Sandisk card. Hope this help! :)

Well I did the same bitrates when using Driftwood's patches and I was able to play them back incamera, and those were the ones that wasnt holding well in 1080i50 at ISO12800 on both High and Low bitrates, thus I find this quite strange.