40Mbps AVCHD High Reliability Patch

Is 40Mbps substantially more stable than the Ipowell's 75Mbps patch?
Is there any reason I shouldn't go with 75Mbps?
What I wish to have is top performance setting without having to worry about a major failure such as in the middle of the wedding ceremony or live interviews.

Thanks
 
I am no expert and just an amateur, but I find no difference in reliability between the two hacks from lpowell. The only failures happen right during the first few seconds and then when the scenes is busy, some dark areas, lots of detail. After many clips, this is easy to avoid. I have not had a failure in a very long time. The failure is also mild, press record again to start recording (no battery removal and re-starting the camera ever). I use nothing but the 75 Peak Hack for the past several weeks... Al
 
I had a couple lockups this weekend with the Stock 14-42 lens @ 14mm and deep depth of field. I was shooting mountain biking in a VERY dense forest in the pacific northwest.
 
I've found that in sunlit dense foliage situations, using a mild diffusion filter on the lens can "take the edge off" the excessive bitrates that can sometimes occur. In daylight, I use a Tiffen Black Diffusion F/X 3 filter and for nighttime, a Tiffen Soft/FX 3 filter (an anamorphic adapter is another good alternative). I believe that most of these lockups due to bitrate overloads are provoked not by the actual details in the scene, but by hyper-sharp aliasing artifacts generated by the sensor itself. These spurious edge details can cause the encoder to allocate excessive bitrate to handle them.
 
lpowell said:
...using a mild diffusion filter on the lens can "take the edge off" the excessive bitrates that can sometimes occur.
Click to expand...

Lee, do you ever make use of a "Fader ND" type device? I've read these have a slight downside of softness so wonder if they might help with clip failures (they seem otherwise extremely useful for ensuring correct shutter speed - I'll definitely be acquiring one).

Likewise, I bet anamorphic lenses will help.
 
I haven't noticed any softness in the Tiffen neutral density filters I've used, and I don't think there should be. A variable ND filter is basically a pair of polarizers aligned together and shouldn't reduce sharpness either.
 
Thanks lpowell. I am going to be getting a set of FD's here in the next week or so. So hopefully that helps a little eh?
 
I recently bought a GH1 (PAL) after reviewing many videos containing both GH1 and GH2 footage. I came to the conclusion that (and I know there are exceptions) GH13 footage can have a certain detailed and yet 'subtle' quality that I've just not seen in the GH2. I did various test shots on the GH1 and to be honest, the footage didn't really seem much better than a little Xacti VPC-SH1 that I own.

However, after 'hacking' the camera with Ipowell's patch I did a few more tests. You might not believe this but even when reviewing the clips in the flip-out screen I could see the difference. This was confirmed after editing some clips in Premiere. The difference is absolutely stunning in AVCHD FHD. I have no plans whatsoever to play with the settings. It looks so good and I'm more than happy to follow the advice of those who have put time and effort into providing these settings.

I'm using a Verbatim Class 6 32GB card and as yet (early days) everything seems to work normally. Thanks to Ipowell and Vitaliy for making this happen. I'm one very happy boy!
 
lpowell said:
I believe that most of these lockups due to bitrate overloads are provoked not by the actual details in the scene, but by hyper-sharp aliasing artifacts generated by the sensor itself. These spurious edge details can cause the encoder to allocate excessive bitrate to handle them.
Click to expand...
I think this must be what I'm experiencing as well, since I get write speed errors after only a couple of frames *trying* to film an aquarium on a tripod at FHD S1/50 25 fpsNative.
I will attempt the presets in this thread now, and see if dropping the Native mode will feel good for the AVC codec..

I'll let you know if these work.
 
Hi, Ipowell! I'm a newbie here, but have read some posts here regarding your patches and people's opinions and tests, though unfortunately I couldn't spend weeks reading all of them. Here are a few things I need cleared before purchasing gh1 myself.
I usually go shoot run and gun style and shoot handheld or sometimes on steadicam. Does GH1 shoot well with handheld? Some posts mentioned that if you do fast pan with GH13, it crashes for it captures too much information in a short time. Maybe it depends on which class of sd card you are using and which patch you are using?
And I'd love to have a playback function possible with a patch installed as I see some unables that function.
Other than those concerns, I will have to figure out as i test it myself. So, which patch do you think is the most suitable for my need? Will this high reliability patch work for it?

Thanks!
 
akataja said:
Hi LPowell

Could you please clarify what do you mean? Isn't the video 25p in PAL FHD mode?

BTW, this patch seem to be really reliable. I used to got write errors when I used LPowell-Blackout 24/25p Native patch with Trancend 16GB class 10 cards.

Pekka
Click to expand...

Since Mr. LPowell, the Guru of patches, is really often swamped with all sorts of queries, I will attempt to step in his place to clarify your question.

In PAL-land the gh1-25p is "usually" packed into a an interlaced stream known technically as 25 PsF, that means although sample at the same moment, the progressive frame is split into 2 interlaced frames. The main advantage in using native 25p, apart from not having to deinterlace, is that the AVCHD encoder works best with true full "native" frames. There is a newest patch is known as LPowell'S wide-latitude patch which allows native 25p, as well as the earlier thread titled "sexy 25p" which had the Blackout-LPowell 24p patch as its basis. Max stability with that patch seemed to work with GOP = 15.

For the everyday-shooter, the high-reliability patch is a very good choice. The other stuff is for the high-end freaks amongst us.

I hope I got it right. That is basically a summary of what I have read on these forums...

good luck, ninetto
 
Last edited:
Hi all, I need a little help. I'm only averaging 13-17 on my clips. Some clips are in the 20's. In the video below, the clips go from my highest mbps rate to lowest starting with 31.9 as an average all the way down to 12.9.






Exposure plays a large factor? Detail of the scene?

Help me out!

Thanks. I've been shooting in avchd. In mjpeg i get great numbers.
​
 
Prophetmatt said:
Hi all, I need a little help. I'm only averaging 13-17 on my clips. Some clips are in the 20's. In the video below, the clips go from my highest mbps rate to lowest starting with 31.9 as an average all the way down to 12.9.






Exposure plays a large factor? Detail of the scene?

Help me out!

Thanks. I've been shooting in avchd. In mjpeg i get great numbers.
​
Click to expand...

The grass and bushes are probably where you should be getting the highest bitrates, as far as I can tell. What are the bitrates if you just took a clip of moving quickly across the grass, on a wide shot?
 
Thanks for the explanation

Thanks for the explanation

I'll go with this patch, I prefer reliability...

Pekka

ninetto said:
Since Mr. LPowell, the Guru of patches, is really often swamped with all sorts of queries, I will attempt to step in his place to clarify your question.

For the everyday-shooter, the high-reliability patch is a very good choice. The other stuff is for the high-end freaks amongst us.

I hope I got it right. That is basically a summary of what I have read on these forums...

good luck, ninetto
Click to expand...
 
A couple of things I'm not following with the Reliability Patch:

What is different from just manually inputting the higher values into Ptool/without the patch?

Are there shutter speed, or any other setting limitations with this patch - for example; Jobless' Ptool settings recommends no lower than "60 shutter speed" or will get poor image quality. I would prefer to not have to remember setting limits on things like shutter speed, or whatever, only to find out later it didn't come out right...or maybe they all have some limitation?

Regarding the 24p native Blackout patch - couldn't you just record in 60p with the reliability patch and drop that file into a 24p timeline/getting more initial data versus shooting 24p?

Thanks. I'm going through these threads, some of it is tough to grasp as far as deciding which settings to go with. I'm primarily looking for the best settings for: "controlled lighting music videos" and "dark, uncontrolled lighting indoor club settings". Would the 24p Blackout patch be the best all-purpose for my situation; cover low light and bitrate?
 
Last edited:
My suggestion is to practice. You can't shortcut this process. Try it under your conditions and learn which is best for you... Al
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top