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GH2 settings for low light shooting
  • 64 Replies sorted by
  • No_SuRReNDeRNo_SuRReNDeR
    I may be thinking about my 32Gig card, maybe I am mistaken on that ,yeah...Dont have my camera with me today either..
  • svackosvacko
    @LongJohnSilver
    what kind of uw housing do you have? Also what lens is best for uw shots?

    thanks.
  • LongJohnSilverLongJohnSilver
    @Meierhans

    TerraQuake is defined "worse" or maybe is more correct "just with less performance" by @driftwood himself:

    *** NEW TerrAQuake *** This is seAQuake verB for poorer type 10 cards. Very slight drop in frame size to work on non top spec type 10 cards.

    From what I understand from his post in the patch vault:

    http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/25865#Comment_25865

    The TerraQuake is designed for poorer class 10 cards, I was expecting a lower bitrate than SPANmyBITCHup.
    Maybe I'm wrong because bitrate is not the only parameter involved in a good patch.

    As I said, recording time is paramount for me (uw use), so I was looking for the best balance between low light and recording time.

    Would be nice is this excel file would be updated by the patch owners (I understood that the first complete revision should be done by them....)

    Bye
  • LongJohnSilverLongJohnSilver
    @svacko

    Nauticam NA-GH2 with 4.33" dome for lumix 8mm f3,5 fisheye

    http://www.nauticam.com/product.asp?id=121

    Depending on the type of photo/video you are interested in, there are several lens/choices:

    http://www.nauticam.com/images/product/pdf_121_2.jpg

    For wide shots you could opt for the rectilinear 7-14mm (too expensive for me) or the cheaper (and worse) Oly 9-18mm

    For macro work you have the expensive Leica 45mm.

    The 10Bar housing is way cheaper but it has (only) 60m operational depth.

    Here you have some examples of the Nauticam capabilities:

    http://www.youtube.com/user/zyzzyvas/videos

    Each dome is designed for a specific lens so no way to use different lenses...

    Once you prepare the camera for the dive, it is safe opening the housing at home after a deep rinsing and drying. so, once in water, you need enough recording time on your card.

    Of course, for the murphy's law, you'll encounter the Little Mermaid once the SD is full :)
  • thepalaliasthepalalias
    @LongJohnSilver My understanding was that Driftwood listed them in acending bitrate order.

    "SpanMyBitchUp patch is good quality for spanning with long record times.
    AQuamotion v2 is medium-high quality with decent spanning recording times + 80% slowdown / EX TELE.
    TerrAQuake is seAQuake but less quality frame sizes for poorer type 10 cards.
    SeAQuake is Very High Quality for hi-end SD cards."

    So the "less quality frame sizes for poorer type 10 cards" was relative to the previously available SeAQuake, not to the patches listed above it.
  • LongJohnSilverLongJohnSilver
    I'm scratching my head :)

    So Aquamotion would have a higher bitrate than the SpanMyBitchUp that I'm using now... I think you are right.

    Would be nice if people is using this patch give us some number or maybe @driftwood himself

    Bye
  • thepalaliasthepalalias
    Here are the 24H mode numbers.

    Factory Default 22 mbps
    SpanMyBitchUp 76 mbps
    AQuamotion v2 100 mbps
    TerrAQuake 166 mbps (with smaller frame sizes for cards that can't handle the larger ones)
    SeAQuake 166 mbps (with larger frame sizes for faster cards)
  • LongJohnSilverLongJohnSilver

    @thepalalias Thanks a lot!!!

  • svackosvacko

    @LongJohnSilver Thanks a lot!!!

  • onedayoneday

    @mbowen84

    what a hell is going on with this series? already have saw some similar posting, like I should post my favorite show in middle of a discussion? or this is time out? fck

  • bostonmikebostonmike

    Guys, this is Terraquake in some various ISO settings..the first is set at 160, the second 320 and the third 640. I'm a film noir fan, so I actually like the first one...damn good detail in low light, thanks again Mr. Driftwood.

  • berndporrberndporr

    Cbrandin's 44mbps, 12 gop, AQ 4 patch looks best so far to me. It never goes below 25MBps (in contrast to Flowmotion which drops to 5MBps ! in low lit areas). Still there are loads of blocking artefacts in areas of low exposure which I really find annoying. Has anybody done any work on this to minimise this? I recently shot a scene in a corridor which is pretty dark until somebody opens a door and light comes in. Before the door opens the blocking artefacts are horrible. I've got the impression that the GH2 throws away virtually all DCT coefficients (except DC) in darker areas which just looks horrible and then still manages to write at 20MBps (which I don't get).

  • KihlianKihlian

    @berndporr I´m looking for this too. I´m trying the last driftwood settings, they have high bitrate also in the dark. I´m not shure if the Dark Matter settings are less noisy than the sedna matrixes on low light?

  • bluesblues

    Try the rigs patch works great on low light

  • berndporrberndporr

    I've now tried out a couple of patches. Most patches drop the bitrate to as low as 10Mbps (the low GOP are the worst offenders) when I point the camera in low lit areas but the sanity 4.1 patch won't do it. It stays at about 35Mbit/secs no matter what the footage is and always generates nice details even at just 10% exposure or less. http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/953/gh2-settings-vault-most-popular-settings-in-one-place/p1 I'm shooting a scene next weekend where a room is first very sparsely lit by light coming from another room and then people switch on the light in the room. With most other patches I would just get horrible blocking artefacts during sparsely lit time. The Sanity 4.1 seems to be the right one for this purpose. Some test footage will be available here:

    (50mm Canon prime f/1.4, ISO160)

  • driftwooddriftwood

    If my GOP1 intra settings are too memory intensive for your low light work (how long do you need to film!?!) - try Cluster v2e. And issit 24p your predominantly after?

    There's various GOP1 settings out on the Driftwood threads which resolve much more detail in the shadows than other settings. But you are gonna need fast bigger memory sd cards to hold the stuff.

    Its horses for courses. If you like your stuff perceptually ok then stick with sub 50Mbps. If you want best quality and to pullout stuff in the shadows then you have to go above 100mbps.

  • berndporrberndporr

    I don't buy this argument. Intra is not needed if the compression is properly adjusted. Esp Sony has perfected that during the years starting with HDV and now with the NEX cameras which have excellent long GOP behaviour. I've been shooting HDV with 25MBit/sec in the past and all the details are there in the shadows. I'm not willing to waste 100mbps basically storing identical numbers on these cards and wasting loads of money. What I've noticed with all the intra hype that it works well filming grass, bushes and other high detail/contrast stuff but it fails dramatically when lighting a subject from a steep angle where the face is often the darkest part of the picture (e.g. moody arthouse stuff). My a bit dated Sony HVR-V1 handles that with ease at 25MBit/sec MEPG2 (!). In contrast, all these intra codecs here still drop to 10MBit/sec when they think there's nothing to store and that's in these moody lighting scenarios the face (!). The sanity patch is so nice because it keeps the bitrate always at 35MBit/secs no matter what's in the picture. I've spent a couple of nights / days with all these intra patches and they all disappoint me and not just because of quality but also because of reliability issues.

  • berndporrberndporr

    After a long swim things are even a bit clearer: the problem lies in the I frames! If they are heavily compressed then also the P/B frames will be poor. All the intra patches basically reveal that the compression of the I frames is far from optimal which uses a simple heuristic: white is important and black is not. So, this means that the compression removes all detail from the blacks and preserves more details in highlights. The GH2 is essentially a consumer camera and they have been brainwashed into the belief that lighting a subject has to be done dead on (flash on camera, sun behind and all these urban myths). This means that the face is usually the brightest area and the background black (and unimportant). Other cameras such as the 550D or my beloved HVR-V1 don't use this simple heuristic. With these I can shoot against a window and create depth without worrying about blocking artefacts in the skin tones. So, from my point of view it would be great if you guys could focus on fixing the broken I frames. Perhaps that's already on its way somewhere here? In the meantime I'm very happy with the sanity patch.

  • driftwooddriftwood

    Go for another swim.

  • DrDaveDrDave

    Try flowmotion in LH mode/24p, which will give you 30-40 bitrate, if that isn't enough, just keep going higher on the patch--it is adjustable--till you get the rate you want. Or get a big card and use Nic's higher bitrate patches.

  • crunchycrunchy

    @berndporr you mentioned that "Cbrandin's 44mbps patch ...never goes below 25MBps". However, just after that you mentioned that "Still there are loads of blocking artefacts in areas of low exposure". On the other side, you mentioned that "sanity 4.1 patch ... stays at about 35Mbit/secs no matter what the footage is". Therefore, it seems that higher bitrate of low-light footage does not guarantee beter quality "per se". However, I agree that very low-bitrate cannot guarantee good picture quality even for darker pictures. So which patches have you tried so far and what are your findings? Is there any reason why you did not use sanity 5? Is it worse than 4.1? I'll have to use 24L settings due to spanning. I don't have 95MB/s cards (only SanDisk 45MB/s, 30MB/s and Transcend class 10).

    I am also trying to find suitable patch for a school play (they usually have darker background) which will give me up to about two hours on 32GB card, so I am very interested in your findings.

  • driftwooddriftwood

    Try Cluster v2f - its a nice safe long GOP (6) and 720p shouldnt really go below 35+mbps, HBR 50+mbps, 24p 116mbps.

  • crunchycrunchy

    @driftwood I am interested in 24P (maybe HBR as well). Does it reliably span on my cards? Note that it's school play which takes more than an hour and I'd like to have relatively sharp dark areas (they can be noisy, but sharp).

  • brianlucebrianluce

    The GH2 is essentially a consumer camera and they have been brainwashed into the belief that lighting a subject has to be done dead on (flash on camera, sun behind and all these urban myths).

    Who are the "They" you're talking about? The same "They" who always say "They say..."? That they?

  • LPowellLPowell

    @crunchy - "Therefore, it seems that higher bitrate of low-light footage does not guarantee better quality "per se". "

    Bitrate is only a measure of complexity, not of quality. The reason that bitrate decreases as illumination diminishes is because AVCHD uses fewer bits to encode the darker shades in the spectrum. The quality of the encoding, however, is determined by how fine are its macroblock quantizing factors (up to a certain point). Once quantization reaches the finest perceptible degree, further increases in bitrate are pointless.

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