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SANITY X - High Bitrate Version of Sanity
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  • Hi Ralph-

    This is my first post on P.V. but I've been using the site for years now and donated!!! I just tried your older Sanity 5.1 patch and found it to be a big improvement and very stable. The only issue is that for contrasty day exterior sky I find it to have a bit more banding than the stock firmware. This is shooting at 1080 24. In low light situations it's very good though. Would Sanity X be likely to improve this? My GH2 is on a camera drone and most of it's work is day exterior so I need to optimize for that. Also, stability is key. Will Sanity X work on normal scandisk #10 cards?

    Thanks!!

  • The answers are yes and yes. I personally use 16GB Sandisk class 10 30M cards with Sanity X and have no problems. The only thing is it will not span at 24P. If spanning is important to you, then you must use a faster card.

    Sanity X is just as stable as Sanity 5.1.

  • Thanks Ralph! Now I have another question/suggestion. Would it be possible to have settings that optimize low light shooting on the 24L setting and settings better for day exterior on the 24H setting? This way one could use the right firmware depending on the need. If I wanted to adjust Sanity X to better control sky banding for day ex. what setting changes would you suggest or is this a bit more than a regular user should bite off? Thanks so much. I know that all the work you and other hackers do takes a lot of time.

  • Sanity X already has that! The 24L setting is the same as Sanity 5.1 24H setting.

    I did that because Sanity 5.1 is still produces the best picture per bitrate of any patch, and it would be a shame to throw it away.

    So now you have Sanity 5.1 and the higher bitrate of Sanity X available in one patch. Use them as you see fit.

  • I make a little comparison. I recorded the same plane changing X and 5.1 Sanity and at first sight not find any difference. With time proves to record shots with movement. To see if they suffer something my SDHC cards

  • Sanity X test with various settings and conditions:

    It's quite weird why VIMEO flattens the image of the video lifting up the shadows too much.

    At the same time the still frames chosen for thumbnails are kept as they are without any alterations.

    No such an issue with YouTube.

  • Hi Ralph. A few questions: I have found that with this hack to change 24p to HBR. Blast capacity is lower. But at the same hack to pass 5.1 (L) values ​​are different. Why can it be?

    I have also tried to record in a trajeta Sandisck spanning 32GB 95w/mbs Sanity and so X has been impossible. At 5 minutes giving jumps writing problems. Turning to 5.1 I have not had problems with the same card

  • I gotta say, out of all the hacks I've tried this has been the most reliable by far. It also seems far less popular than the others judging by the lack of replies...

  • Maybe it was just me, but I've had really bad luck with Sanity X last week:

    Did a 1,5h shot (one take). After I've restarted the camera file wasn't there anymore... no file! Nothing similar happened on many shorter takes.

    Did anybody else have such experience?

  • @dempeas Sanity is actually quite poplular. The reason you don't hear much about it is because it just works. People don't have much to report.

    @tetakpatak There's no way Sanity or any hack could make a file disappear. The file system is simply not part of the hacking toolkit. It sounds like your card got corrupted.

  • @tetakpatak

    I must modify the last statement. On rare occassions, a clip may not playback in the camera. I have no idea why that is. But the good news is, the clip is still on the card. It hasn't 'disappeared'. It will copy off the card and play on your computer just fine. It's a minor inconvenience, and I apologize for it.

  • Thx, @Ralph_B, I am still on the road and have no PC access yet-it would be great if the file is still there. I've removed the card and will check in the PC. Please, you don't have to appologize, there is anyway no warranty and I'm old p-v user.

  • OK, great news: now I'm back home and the long recording is on the SD card. Perfectly fine, spanned about 6 times within some 1,5 hours. The files are perfectly visible in the PC and uncorrupted.

    Nevertheless, it is good that you know now @Ralph_B that the AVCHD files weren't even visible or listed in the camera after the recording. I've shot a still pic few minutes after end of the video recording and the still was playbacked as file 1 of 1. It never happened before and I've used bunch of settings.

  • @tetakpatak

    I'm glad everything is OK. Like I said, it's a mystery why the camera sometimes won't 'see' a file for playback. But the file is definitely on the card and is intact.

  • @dempeas As Ralph said, it is very popular and mostly with people that need a reliable setting that doesn't need the extremes others have. I use other settings...as a matter of fact I'm playing with T8 now and have to admit it's low light performance is very good. But at the beginning of an important shoot, Sanity gets loaded again. The other reason it doesn't get a lot of posts is that Ralph is one of the quietest professionals I know. No chest beating, just solid information that doesn't need a lot of discussion to get Sanity to work. In the end it's your experience with Sanity that matters. Give it a serious workout and I'll bet you join the quiet ranks of users.

    It's the beginning of the legislative season again and just as in past years, it'll be Sanity on my B&C cameras and I won't develop ulcers worrying about them being locked down and running unattended.

  • I've been using Sanity for some time now and give it high marks. Can use readily available cards and the image is visibly better in the blacks and low mids than stock. This is done without visible sacrifice in the highlights. With good cards I've never had a crash or write error. Thanks Ralph!!

  • Thanks, guys. Even though Sanity users are quiet, once in awhile it's nice to know you're out there.

  • @avendlerdp I also admire Sanity, it is besides Cake v2.3 the greatest setting for long recordings. BTW, I use always only best of best SD cards, in the last case it was (original) Sandisk Extreme 64GB 95MB/s

  • Hi,

    Thanks for the excellent Sanity X, Ralph_B!

    I'm new here, and still testing as many patches as possible so as to get something stable on most cards, efficient, of an overall high-quality IQ wise, and that always offers workable in-GH2 previews (including MPEGs; if not, I simply uncheck said modified section in PTool...) I also add all Pasadena Pulse Audio V2 settings to anything installed (manually for now, being utterly unable to get PTool to merge said audio patch with anything within Mac OS' WineBottler emu of PTool).

    I must also admit that I keep moving back and forth btw your Sanity X (+ Pasadena), Cake 2.3 (+ Pasadena), and Flow Motion v2.02 (- its MPEGs boost), for these are the only "conservative" albeit powerful patches that make me feel 100% secure in all shooting modes (sorry Driftwood, I've tried many!) The first two aforementioned seem to share a similar IQ, very bright and clear, whereas Flow Motion offers a darker somewhat more cinematic feel (?) I'm thus wondering now: how close/far from each other are those three hacks, technologically speaking? In other words, what are their main similarities/differences in practical terms (specific uses)???

    1000x THKs!

    Oh, btw, Sanity X gets along well with two out of three of the following cards:

    Lexar 600x 32 GB = XX, no... After five minutes, the card error messages won't leave me alone. Lexar 400x 32 GB = ALL OK! Better buffers!? SanDisk 80MB/s 32 GB = ALL OK!

  • @Marathonianbull

    I can't speak for the other hacks, but for Sanity my primary goal was to make it as transparent and invisible as possible. In other words, what goes in is very close to what comes out. The way I developed it was by carefully comparing the 'hacked' picture to the uncompressed HDMI output (which is the absolute reference). My second goal was to do all this at 'sane' bitrates. And the third goal was absolute reliability.

    Hope this gives you some insight.

  • @Ralph_B

    Thanks for your insight! And Sanity just works... I was a bit harsh towards Driftwood's patches, but in fact all of them make my SD cards (including the Sandisk 95Mb/s UHS-1 U3) misbehave whenever there's a big enough discrepancy between the selected shutter speed and a given boosted bitrate... Am I just unlucky, or clueless?

  • I stand corrected lol. "It just works" is a perfect tagline for the hack now that I think about it.

  • Yes it works, and images are crisp and clean! If I compare them with those of other GH2 hacks, I think that it's also very fluid. Some patches are great for still shots, others are better at following movements, some change the colour matrix, etc.; Sanity is right in the middle. I certainly hope that an XXX version is on its way (slightly bolder, with higher frame rate in every shooting mode!)

  • Hi Ralph please help me with something. I am looking at using the Sanity X patch. Does the patch work in all the modes I intend to shoot? For example if I put the camera into iA mode or potrait mode, and I push the video button will the video record with the sanity x hack enabled or stock? ? or will it only work in manual video mode? I am a little confused. Please help. Maybe a better way of wording it, is there any setting on the camera whereby the sanity x video hack is not enabled? thank you

  • @ralph_B

    Another silent user here :) Why Sanity? For all the reasons you list. Of course there are other great hacks out there esp Driftwood's - but Sanity is the one I keep loaded on the camera 99% of the time. Many thanks Ralph_B. I use gh4 primarily now as 4k resolution is impossible to match with any GH2 hack but for 1080p output, a Sanity driven GH2 works seamlessly alongside gh4 footage.