Joshua Csehak

If you download 5DtoRGB, it'll tell you what the bitrate is; that should help. Although, I have the 88mb hack, and it's telling me the bitrate is 57mb. Guessing that's cause it's variable?

Thanks Ed. Holy cow, I thought I was confused enough already! :)

ooo, double backups -- I like it. Thanks Jamie!

Ah well, retype, summarize: 5DtoRGB is awesome! Thanks Ed! 160/320/640 ISO bugs? I've been shooting on those only. Should I not? Thanks for the compressor link Francisco! It's so slow -- i'll definitely try that. I've got a mid-2010 (I think) mac pro with 2x2.26 ghz quad-core procs, 24 gigs ram, and ati radeon hd 4870 graphics card. So that shouldn't be the issue... Update: So, using the exact same method, I think I was able to install the intra esting hack. 5DtoRGB says the bit rate is at 54 or so (though the hack is supposed to be 88, right?), and the file size is about 400mb/minute. I can't tell much of a difference, though I just did one quick and dirty test.

Rosebud, Ed recommended 5DtoRGB to me in another thread -- definitely check it out! transcoding mts files with 709 results in a beautifully gradable image. I would try copying the mts files to your HD so you've got them backed up in their "raw" format, and transcoding to prores 422 proxy with 5DtoRGB. Proxy looks pretty amazing, and should work out to about 250mb/minute, which is less than 1/4 the size of HQ.

What the?!? I responded to this last night, and now it is gone. DB issues?

Boy, this stuff sure is confusing. I got Andrew's guide, and I've combed through all the threads here, but I'm still muddled on some things. So much so that I broke it out into groups: The patch: I loaded (at least, I think I did) the RoadRunner patch on my GH2 (I have a 95 MB/sec SanDisk Extreme Pro card, so I figured it'd be good). The menus are now in all languages, so I think it worked. Except the footage is really small. Like, 137 MB for a 1 minute file. And Premiere says the average data rate is 2.3 MB/sec, which is 18.4 mbps. In addition, 24H and 24L look the same to me, and are about the same file size. I don't know what I did wrong! It looks great, mind you, miles ahead of the canons, but I still feel like I messed something up. I tried to revert back to the old 1.11 firmware, but the camera wouldn't recognize it (though it still lets me load new hacked firmwares). The camera: - What's up with the red record button, and the silver shutter button. They both seem to do the same thing. But I read somewhere that the red one only does 24L. Does that make any sense? I can't tell myself, b/c 24H and 24L look the same to me. - Manual movie mode / High Bit Rate / 24P Cinema -- what's the difference? Which one should I be using? Does the hack affect all of them? - i.dynamic -- does this do anything in movie mode? I can't see that it does. - i.resolution -- ibid The footage: Okay, this is the bit that's really killing me. It seems to play back smoothly in the camera, but when I watch it on the computer, it's stuttery. Not bad, but just enough to drive me crazy. I'm guessing it's a playback issue. But holy cow, workflow with AVCHD is a nightmare! With the DSLR, I used to transcode to ProRes with Mpeg Streamclip, and drop it into FCP 7 and everything worked fine. With .mts files, the only transcode apps I've had any success with are both problematic. If I use Media Converter, it appears to work fine at first, but if I play the .mov in QT Player 10, when I step through the frames with the right arrow key, every 4th press doesn't go to the next frame. And if I play it in QT player 7, I get weird blocky artifacts sometimes, and if I step through it, after going forward a few frames, it'll jump BACKWARDS a frame. So much for that. If I use Adobe Media Encoder CS5 and transcode to ProRes, everything appears magically delicious when I watch it in QT Player 10, but when I bring it into FCP 7 to edit, the audio is misaligned! Aargh! So I've been just editing the files in Premiere directly. The only problem is it's still a bit choppy during playback, though it seems to be fine when I export the final product. And the other only problem is, I'm not a huge fan of editing in Premiere. Speaking of which, when I make a new sequence in Premiere, no matter how I set it, the footage looks scrambled and corrupted. But if I duplicate a working sequence and drag new .mts files onto it, it looks fine. Obviously, I created the working sequence at some point, but I have NO idea how, and I can't for the life of me recreate it! Does anyone have a workflow that they're really happy with that they'd like to share? Or insight into what's wrong with mine? All in all, even with all the confusion, the GH2 is still quite an amazing upgrade from the Canon DSLRs. I regret nothing ;) thanks, Josh

[quote author=Sara link=topic=302.msg1962#msg1962 date=1330029396] I went through similar tests but was struggling to find a difference...and the change in color from smooth to cinema (punchy colors) almost makes it not worth it unless someone would "want" that color shift.  Frustrating that we have to deal with these gamma/color profiles and don't have acesss to something more neutral.  Sorry I couldn't find more of a difference.  Maybe someone else? [/quote] Not following you. You mean you're struggling to find a difference between smooth and cinema? Agree that the cinema colors are a bit too punchy, even at -2 saturation... [quote author=Francisco Ríos link=topic=302.msg1988#msg1988 date=1330105682] I found these. Maybe can helps. [url=http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?233022-Heads-explode-GH2-film-mode-test-charts]http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?233022-Heads-explode-GH2-film-mode-test-charts[/url] Saludos! [/quote] Thanks Francisco! Those are pretty useful for color comparisons, but not so much for dynamic range. A piece of paper can transmit only 5 or 6 stops of brightness, which just about any camera can handle. That's why I rigged the ND gel DR tester. Still messing around with these settings... It may be that all three (cinema, nostalgic, and smooth) have their place...

My conclusion so far: Nostalgic is the king of both color accuracy (pending further tests) and dynamic range. Normalized to a white at 100%, it has a stop more of information in the blacks. But since cinema applies a curve to everything, the lights end up with more color information. It just might be worth shooting cinema and bringing up your gamma +1.33 in post, since the noise gain so far seems to be negligible. The lights, which includes people with light skin tone, will look richer. But I need to do a lot more real-world testing before I'm sure of that. Here's the key question: what if you shoot a scene with cinema, and again with nostalgic, but underexposed so that they're normalized to the darks, not the lights. Will the values at 70-95 look the same? Will it be basically the same, except with more headroom? That's my next experiment.

Here's something else interesting. Nostalgic is actually not warmer, it's less cooler! To get it to true gray, I have to further bring down the blue channel. Here it is with that:

And here's the 60D, for reference. It's about as noisy as smooth/nostalgic, and it looks like it actually has a half-stop less DR than nostalgic. So much for the idea that the GH2 has less DR than Canon!

Here's cinema. No surprises here, I don't think. It falls apart much more than the other two, with another half-stop less information.

and here's smooth. This is interesting -- nostalgic seems to have a half stop or so extra DR on the low end!

But that's my subjective opinion. Let's look at what's really going on in those darks. Cranking them all up by +2.7 gamma (and -0.05 lift so we can see what we're working with) reveals the bits at the lowest end. Here's nostalgic:

But now what if I take the Cinema shot and grade it with +1.33 to the gamma (and bring the lift down -0.04 to bring the blacks back to black). Now the darks match, the highlights blow out exactly the same, but the lights are much darker. Smooth is indeed smoother, but the lights, before they hit 100%, are much lighter and have less color information. It seems like, if you can keep your highlights from blowing out, cinema is the way to go, b/c you retain more information in the 2-3 stops below 100%. But is it noisier in the darks? Not that I can tell. Playing the footage, the grain looks about the same to my eye.

from my 60D, for reference (picture style Neutral, everything as flat as I could make it)

cinema

smooth

I hear what you guys are saying, and I agree with you in theory. I understand about ETTR and stuff (thanks for the pdf link though, Sara -- they put it really well!). But it looks to me that in some cases, Cinema simply looks better than Smooth/Nostalgic, and I'm trying to figure out a) why, and b) if that means I should be using Cinema in spite of the fact that it technically has less dynamic range. After all, if it looks better, it is better, right? Here are my dynamic range tests. They are with the Roadrunner hack. I used my "DR650" [url=http://www.magicgoggles.com/blog/?p=5]http://www.magicgoggles.com/blog/?p=5[/url], which is just a bunch of 1-stop NDs on top of each other. They probably don't show anything you don't already know, but maybe you'll find them useful. They are NOT shot at the same aperture. What I did was open the aperture until the brightest spot on the bulb blew out just a bit. So they're all normalized for the top end of the highlights. I feel like this accurately represents real-world situations, b/c when ETTR, oftentimes what you might do is open it up all the way, and close it down till the highlights (or at least, the highlights you care about) aren't blown out. The first thing you can see is that -- just as you said -- out of the camera, cinema has about a stop less dynamic range on the low end.

cinema adjusted

smooth

I'm finding that Cinema is actually a more useful setting than Smooth. Thought I'd share my results with you guys and get your take on things. First, I did a pure dynamic range test, and Smooth seemed to come out a stop or two ahead (as did Nostalgic). But then, after a couple test shots, it seemed like light-colored objects looked more natural in Cinema, though the gamma crushed the blacks too much for my taste. So I shot a direct comparison. The first attachment is on Cinema, the second on Smooth. No surprises there. But I adjusted the gamma of the Cinema clip (this is all in Color, btw) to match the overall brightness of the Smooth clip, which is the third attachment. Looks to me like there's no extra noise in the lows -- everything looks the exact same there -- and a lot more detail and range in the highs. The adjusted Cinema image looks flatter to my eye, and more natural. The Smooth image looks as if I took the adjusted Cinema image and applied some contrast. As we all know, you can always add contrast, but you can't really take it away, so I'm thinking, Cinema is actually the best choice for maximum image quality. Of course, this depends on your application. If I was shooting stuff that wasn't going to go to a colorist, but straight to the web (or broadcast), I'd use Smooth for sure. Thoughts?