Wow, just loaded up this patch and shot some footage... amazing! Very nice and organic. It also can take pretty much any grading you can throw at it without significant degradation. I really hope there will be an option for different frame-rates (24p, 25p, ect.) so it can be used in dialog scenes. Right now I'm just shooting the 30p and conforming it to 24p with CinemaTools... which works for about anything you don't need audio sync for.

Also, there is no underexposed banding... (so far) it may help solve the "8-bit scapegoat." It is a bit noisier though, so maybe it is just up-scaling the 720p mode?

Not getting any read/write errors either. Using a SanDisk Extream 8gb 45mbp/s card.

@Lpowell

Can you help me? From 10 Shots 8 Clips have bitrates about 40-50 Mbit and 2 Clips have 90-95 Mbit. Only the 90 Mbit clips are looking good. I allways used shutter 1/60. What went wrong?

@cosimo_bullo

maybe the same problem. But only with transcend 32 gb class 10 cards. Writing speed is near 12 mbyte/s, so maybe the card limit.

With Sandisk extreme 30mb/s there´s no problem. But I want to use my two 32gb cards.

@Lpowell

Could you tell me mjpg settings with max. bitrate peaks of 80mbit, so I can use my 32 gb cards? Thanks.

@Angry C. That could be it, but I'd have imagined a card speed issue would have resulted in a failure, not in corrupted footage... Hmmm. I'm using Class 10 patriot 16 gig cards, btw.

@cosimo_bullo:

Maybe this is a help for you, too.
I changed the settings to the following values and now all my files are about 80 mbit in reallife shots and 90 mbit on deathchart. This can be handled by my transcend class 10 cards.

720p30 width=1920
720p30 height=1080
E1 Quality=360
E1 Table=24
E2 Quality=180
E2 Table=36
E3 Quality=158
E3 Table=48
E4 Quality=135
E4 Table=4

@Angry_C. That seems to have fixed the problem... interesting, and THANK YOU. So the card doesn't necessarily cause a failure but can cause a degradation. Scary.

sorry double

Looking at the 1080p originals the person on Vimeo posted overlayed on a timeline, the AVCHD and the MJPEG both seem pretty close, but AVCHD looks much better to the pixel peep. I'd guess that has more to do with the frame compression then with how much detail the MJPEG mode is capable of resolving.. or is originally working with.. or whatever. Now although there is motion in the scene, it's still a static camera shot, where parts of the the image aren't moving and AVCHD should excel greatly. A scene with high detail and more camera motion might show the playing field more leveled, though that's even harder to setup a test for in a controled manner.
We still locked to 30fps for MJPEG?

Also note the color noise/pixel_mess at the bottom of the MJPEG frames. Furthermore, am I noticing the same odd jagged color edges in the MJPEG that we've come across in 4:2:2 captures off the HDMI on the GH2? Mainly seeing it in the reds.

I am not commenting on the resolution of the hack in normal shooting mode.....

however. I applied this hack to my gh2 and set the camera to ex tele mode and I noticed that even though the file reads as being 1920 by 1080, it has the exact same framing as the 72060p ex tele mode. Due to the fact that ex tele uses a 1:1 pixel ration I can only conclude that it was upscaling the footage to 1080p because it could not possibly have had enough pixels for true 1080p.

that being said. I would love to use this patch and would welcome an ideas on how to solve this issue. I only shoot in ex tele mode so this is a deal breaker for me

@GrgrMD:

"Also note the color noise/pixel_mess at the bottom of the MJPEG frames."

I'm glad you're seeing that too. I thought it might have been our camera.

Update for PTool 3.62d, with support for anamorphic MJPEG videos at up to 2160x1080p!

Thanks once again to Vitaliy, PTool now supports MJPEG frame sizes beyond 1920 pixels wide. I've made use of this new feature to optimize the GH2 for native anamorphic shooting with both 1.33X adapters in HD video mode, as well as 2X adapters in VGA video mode. Used with an appropriate anamorphic lens, these MJPEG modes will produce videos that are automatically played back at the correct widescreen aspect ratio, without need for post-production stretching:

HD mode: 1920x810 videos for 1.33X anamorphic adapters, with peak bitrates of 100Mbps.
VGA mode: 2160x810 videos for 2X anamorphic adapters, with peak bitrates of 100Mbps.

* Note that the 2160x810 VGA mode produces an aspect ratio of 2.66:1. For a 2.37:1 aspect ratio, you'll want to crop these videos to a 1920x810 frame size.

@CraftyClown
"...I can't see a good workflow for working with these nice anamorphic settings in PAL land :("

I've used the 30p MJPEG mode on my old GH1 for music video's before. I conformed the footage to 24p and it all had a slight slo-motion effect. Of course we had to speed up the song on set for playback. You could do the same thing just conform to 25p.

@CraftyClown
@Brian202020
Brian's 30p->24p conforming trick is how I use MJPEG as well. I find the 20% slow-down adds a cinematic quality that isn't quite recognizable as a slow-motion effect. For music videos, however, I'd just go with 30p as it tracks the performers' movements better than 24p.

@Ulisse
If you use MJPEG mode at 1920x810 without an anamorphic lens, the frames will come out looking vertically squashed, which is probably not what you're looking for.