GH2 Are all these new hacks and patches creating a placebo effect?

maarek said:
Speaking as someone who doesn't own a GH2 yet (gasp!) but who does do a lot of pixel peeping because my work duties are a lot of encoding/compositing/vfx work, I would say that the hacks enable something that I've always wanted. Intra-frame encoding. You basically get rid of all the compression artifacts that have been plaguing cameras since forever. Now 90mbit/s versus 170 is pretty much debatable. I'd personally go with the lower one just because of cards. But at those bitrates you can achieve good quality and diminishing returns after 100mbit/s.
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Be careful. Apparently experience and having eyes trained for these sorts of things means nothing. You may be asked to prove your statements.
 
JMZ said:
mentatDUKE,

You make some very good points. I think testing and experimenting are great and agree it's a necessary component of the process. It will allow us to develop a set of tools we can all take advantage of depending on our needs. But lately (and this is just my opinion...) there seems to be a bit of an undercurrent aimed at disproving the things the hacks have brought to the table. Or perhaps simply saying they're not as great as we all might think. I don't really care because I'll test what I need, compare it to what other cams I have available and use the one that works best for me.

Maybe I'm still feeling after effects from other camera forums I used to frequent more often.

I dig your $1 paintbrush metaphor too.
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No body is trying to diminish the benefit of the hack. Instead we are trying to actually show what the benefits are and are not. It doesn't help anyone if people keep making wild claims about what it does. There are numerous people that have installed the higher bit rate hacks and then decided that it isn't worth it because the bit rate was just too cumbersome and it may not work with their memory cards. That person may have been perfectly happy with a lower bit rate hack but now they just think the hack has too many drawbacks to deal with.

I am not trying to persuade anyone from using any particular hack. Instead I am trying to get everyone to see that each hack has its merits and its drawbacks. Knowing what the advantages and disadvantages are is what will help each person decide what hack is best for them.

The thing that makes me mad is when certain people make wild, general, and unsubstantiated claims that one hack is flawless and without drawbacks. It makes people new to the hack think that those settings are the only options available. There not. There are completely stable hacks, there are higher hacks that are stable with most cards, and there are the highest hacks that are stable with only certain cards and lenses.

When I see something that I disagree with I am going to speak up and provide evidence as to why I believe that way. So many other people just accept what others say as gospel without any evidence to back up the claims.
 
"That person may have been perfectly happy with a lower bit rate hack but now they just think the hack has too many drawbacks to deal with."That's a bit assumptious..That because there are very high settings...people either take it, or turn away from it all together...?High/Low, I think people are perfectly able to choose what suits them best.I have Class 10 cards, and am perfectly choose, what suits my needs. Me knowing that I can push the camera more, allows some flexibility depending on my needs, not to mention, encourages me to explore these setting on my own.Not only am I provided detailed information how to anyalise my settings, but I can test and veify other settings, because of those pushing their own cameras.Your right in th fact that some, hype things a bit too much, but that's the culture of today...everything is not always what it seems. I think most people on these forums can figure out these things without "parental" supervision.Look at what this camera already can do.... You can see the tests pitting it against other, VERY high end cameras 5-10 times more costly, and because the evolution of these patches, this camera can hold it's own...confidently.Surely, you realize anyone using the higher end patches... Have the need for that quality. Its not someone filming their children's party...(wrote this on my phone, so excuse my typing mistakes)
 
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daihard said:
"That person may have been perfectly happy with a lower bit rate hack but now they just think the hack has too many drawbacks to deal with."That's a bit assumptious..That because there are very high settings...people either take it, or turn away from it all together...?High/Low, I think people are perfectly able to choose what suits them best.I have Class 10 cards, and am perfectly choose, what suits my needs. Me knowing that I can push the camera more, allows some flexibility depending on my needs, not to mention, encourages me to explore these setting on my own.Not only am I provided detailed information how to anyalise my settings, but I can test and veify other settings, because of those pushing their own cameras.Your right in th fact that some, hype things a bit too much, but that's the culture of today...everything is not always what it seems. I think most people on these forums can figure out these things without "parental" supervision.Look at what this camera already can do.... You can see the tests pitting it against other, VERY high end cameras 5-10 times more costly, and because the evolution of these patches, this camera can hold it's own...confidently.Surely, you realize anyone using the higher end patches... Have the need for that quality. Its not someone filming their children's party...(wrote this on my phone, so excuse my typing mistakes)
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I think that the majority of people here have the need for reliability above Quality. If you are shooting for money it doesn't matter how good it "would" look if you miss the shot entirely. Now that doesn't mean that the higher hacks are completely unreliable. Some of them are stable with the right lens and the right video card. However, there are many reasons why that would not work for everyone. Just the same as someone may not want a lower bit rate hack because they need intra frame for editing and it is stable enough for their needs.

Anyway the information is out there now. Everyone has the data and examples they need to make that decision for themselves.
 
This is true for me. Reliability is No. 1. I spent weeks developing a patch the would span on the GH1 reliably after missing a few minutes during a live event. And one of the reasons I don't haul the high end preamps around is that many of them are slightly more likely to pick up RF.
 
if this is hacked footage then something is not set up to high bitrate.
HUGE macroblocking in the back.
 
Yes huge macro blocking in the dark part in the curtain, typical of what you see in un-hacked footage where the blocky compression is high in the underexposed part. You can clearly see it in the curtains. The hacked footage would have been very fine grain like structure. Now jpeg are not good indicator because it can add another generation of compression, but at this level of compression for the jpeg the artifacts are just too big. So I am sure 99% that it is a stock footage.

I must say that those artifacts are really present in the middle tone also in the curtain!!!!!!!! You can clearly see those bands like columns in the curtain.
 
I added some noise to the second photo and saved it again as jpeg. At level 11 it was showing 1100 k and at 9 about 500k very near to the file size of the above. The noise was preserved (the macro blocking was gone because of the dithering because I put a quite high lvel of noise). So now I can more or less take out the jpeg compression as the reason for those macro blocking. So I am 99.99% sure that it is stock gh2 footage.
 
sequence01still010 4 crop.jpg

Just a little crop to show what I did. I did a crop because it tends to re-size image on dvxuser, it is really sad that the forum does not allow at least 1080p image size without resizing. This thing went in two phase of compression, so the jpeg 9 level compression did preserve most of the ... noise/fake detail that I added so I think it is not the culprit in the macro blocking.
 
Danielvilliers: Well, you are right :) Its frame from unhacked GH2 (i need 25p) and there is macro blocking, but i still think, that unhacked footage looks really nice. =)

btw iam really looking forward to hack for 1.1
 
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