AVCHD high bitrate tests- MUD FREE footage

Ozpeter said:
Before I went to bed last night I checked the originally posted before-and-after example and try as I might, at normal speed or when stepping through frame by frame, I couldn't see any persuasive difference between the two - certainly I wouldn't be able to pick which is which if presented with the two without prior knowledge of their identity. I've just done the same in the clear light of day, and I still can't. Maybe it's not a suitable example, or there's something wrong with my eyes.

Has anything else been posted before-and-after which would be more persuasive? Just 'after' isn't a meaningful test in my book.
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That's true for the most part. The issue never was when the GH1 was not moving. The images looked good. However any pans or movement would render mud. This affected the moving frame.

Mjpeg is the route to be doing. Hopefully we can get the Mjpeg in 1080P at the highest bit rate; that is golden for me. I like AVCHD, however mjpeg at higher bit rate delivers a very smooth tonality. The color in mjpeg with my 70+ mbit is gorgeous.

Mjpeg I can pull apart in AE and it's doesn't give in. AVCHD, not the same. Yes 1080P can be sharper, however detail is only one slice of the pie. That's why 720P at 60Mbits is better than 1080P at 60mbits. I would rather have more bits thrown at the smaller frame, than a bigger one. It pays you back in the end with a high bit rate codec rendition that allows for better tonality and color in post and distribution. IMHO


Pappas
 
OK, I'm now seeing the problem clearly at 6 seconds in, in the "before" footage, though after that portion of that clip it's not nearly so bad. The "after" footage has no such problem at any point. I guess to be persuaded I'd need to see a much longer comparison - and for that I'd have to do it myself!
 
tester13 said:
Your video is the same as myn and jobeless, also 47,92fps reported by MediaInfo.
And as some players (I use ZoomPlayer) play footage at this framerate it can be quite high probability that camera is affected by same problem.
As 720p24 footage (cropped from 1080p24) show good framerate and plays fine in camera.
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Yeah, funny. I was actually referring to early Car3o footage when he was for the first time showing the native 24p patch. He had cars going back and forth at night. This footage dropped to a 23.976 1080p Edius Neo 2 timeline was "real" 24p. The latest footage of jobless (first post on first page of this thread) clearly is not correct 24p, or at least Edius doesn't interpret it correctly (whatever it is).

Just relying on players (and scrubbing back and forth) to judge if it is 24p or not doesn't work (you run into all these issues with "tolerant" players and less tolerant players, plus the fact that computer screens typically run on 60Hz, thereby possibly hiding some of the issues). You have to go to a timeline in an editing software and check frame by frame in a 23.976p environment. Then you see it.

Anyway, thanks to all the efforts. We are damn close!!


UPDATE: I used the vimeo example on page 3 just now, "C" settings and Field of Flowers from IanB (downloaded the MTS file) and also this was supposed to be native 24p. It is not. Out of curiosity I applied the pulldown I usually have to do with original GH1 footage and now I get "real" 24p. Hence, I think that the native 24p patch doesn't work correctly or somehow is obsolete if high AVCHD bitrates are chosen from ptool.
 
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I'll ask here rather than clutter the main thread - are we likely to see in-camera switchable bitrates in due course, so that one can go from 'consumer' quality to 'pro' quality as the occasion demands, and secondly, as I understand it the codec should vary its bitrate to meet the demands of the shot, so can the 'curve' involved be altered so that it would significantly ramp up the bitrate for (say) fast pans, but leave it more or less original bitrate for static shots?

Overall I'm thinking in terms of optimising filesize/quality tradeoffs.
 
250mbk6.jpg


http://www.sendspace.com/file/amiv1h [MTS format, 79.8MB]

Okay, first clip... I shot this using the (outdated?) "B" settings from Tester13, I missed the "D" settings somehow. So the quality will probably be even better next time.

Camera stuff: 50mm Nikon f/1.4 with m4/3 adapter, Kowa 2X anamorphic mounted on front. To display it correctly you need to unsqueeze the image. In FCP, that's a -100 in the "Distort" tab under Motion; in After Effects, just interpret the clip with a 2.0 pixel aspect ratio, or you can reduce the Y scale to 50%. In Quicktime you would change the resolution to 1920x540. I was using a modified "Normal" film mode with -2 Contrast, +1 Sharpening, -2 Saturation, 0 NR. Aperture was f/11, focused near infinity, 1/50 shutter, ISO either 100 or 160. Apologies for the crappy handheld.

One thing this firmware hasn't fixed yet - I'm still getting color shifts during pans. I don't think it shows up in this clip but I'll upload another one where it does. Basically the color green suddenly changes to a different shade while the other colors in the picture seem the same. It's not a white balance thing, I had it manually set. And it seems to happen on both AVCHD and Motion JPEG.
 
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Ozpeter said:
I'll ask here rather than clutter the main thread - are we likely to see in-camera switchable bitrates in due course, so that one can go from 'consumer' quality to 'pro' quality as the occasion demands, and secondly, as I understand it the codec should vary its bitrate to meet the demands of the shot, so can the 'curve' involved be altered so that it would significantly ramp up the bitrate for (say) fast pans, but leave it more or less original bitrate for static shots?

Overall I'm thinking in terms of optimising filesize/quality tradeoffs.
Click to expand...

That would be good.

I would like to set a narrow Hi/low zone that the mjpeg codec never went below a certain point. So even if the scene is dark, it would still throw a strong bit rate at it- keeping the low key frame clean.

.

.
 
Not to get greedy, but has anyone done any low-light testing? I'm curious if the better codec might help noise in the shadows and possibly even fixed pattern noise, although that might not be possible.

This is all very cool stuff.
 
http://www.sendspace.com/file/af64gf [MTS format, 61mb]

Here's a real codec torture test. Stock 14-140 lens @ 14mm, f/11, 1/800 shutter, ISO boosted a bit to 400 or so to compensate. Then just an outrageous whip pan back and forth. No mud spotted :)

Oh and this is using the "D" settings for AVCHD. The first shot I made outdoors with the "D" settings, my camera gave a message saying it stopped recording because of write speed limitations. I had to pull the battery in order to reset. Oddly when I made the same exact shot again, it didn't give any more errors and recorded fine. It only happened on that first shot.
 
Isaac_Brody said:
Are you getting same results with new patch? Be interested to see if new one fixes this.
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Haven't been able to reproduce the artifact yet, so that's a good sign, but it's always been pretty intermittent for me. I had the same issues on the stock GH1 firmware 9 months ago, so I'm skeptical that the current firmware mods will clear it up completely, but maybe they will go away just because the bitrate is so much higher.
 
Oedipax said:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/af64gf [MTS format, 61mb]

Here's a real codec torture test. Stock 14-140 lens @ 14mm, f/11, 1/800 shutter, ISO boosted a bit to 400 or so to compensate. Then just an outrageous whip pan back and forth. No mud spotted :)

Oh and this is using the "D" settings for AVCHD. The first shot I made outdoors with the "D" settings, my camera gave a message saying it stopped recording because of write speed limitations. I had to pull the battery in order to reset. Oddly when I made the same exact shot again, it didn't give any more errors and recorded fine. It only happened on that first shot.
Click to expand...


That's weird with the write speeds. What sd card? How does "D" compare to the others?
 
GMC said:
Yeah, funny. I was actually referring to early Car3o footage when he was for the first time showing the native 24p patch. He had cars going back and forth at night. This footage dropped to a 23.976 1080p Edius Neo 2 timeline was "real" 24p. The latest footage of jobless (first post on first page of this thread) clearly is not correct 24p, or at least Edius doesn't interpret it correctly (whatever it is).

Just relying on players (and scrubbing back and forth) to judge if it is 24p or not doesn't work (you run into all these issues with "tolerant" players and less tolerant players, plus the fact that computer screens typically run on 60Hz, thereby possibly hiding some of the issues). You have to go to a timeline in an editing software and check frame by frame in a 23.976p environment. Then you see it.

Anyway, thanks to all the efforts. We are damn close!!


UPDATE: I used the vimeo example on page 3 just now, "C" settings and Field of Flowers from IanB (downloaded the MTS file) and also this was supposed to be native 24p. It is not. Out of curiosity I applied the pulldown I usually have to do with original GH1 footage and now I get "real" 24p. Hence, I think that the native 24p patch doesn't work correctly or somehow is obsolete if high AVCHD bitrates are chosen from ptool.
Click to expand...


I uploaded two files. One was a 24p MJPEG file with skipped frames, the other was a .mts file.
I haven't changed or patched my camera any and the link of the girl sitting in the car is from the same patch as the two files of cars passing by. Nothing's changed on my end. So you must be referring to the MJPEG file.

By any measure, the files are 47 fps and change, drop that into a 24p timeline and you'll get 24p.
 
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Oedipax said:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/af64gf [MTS format, 61mb]

Here's a real codec torture test. Stock 14-140 lens @ 14mm, f/11, 1/800 shutter, ISO boosted a bit to 400 or so to compensate. Then just an outrageous whip pan back and forth. No mud spotted :)

Oh and this is using the "D" settings for AVCHD. The first shot I made outdoors with the "D" settings, my camera gave a message saying it stopped recording because of write speed limitations. I had to pull the battery in order to reset. Oddly when I made the same exact shot again, it didn't give any more errors and recorded fine. It only happened on that first shot.
Click to expand...

Wow that seals it for me. I was wondering what the hi shutter speed shots would be like. I shoot at 1/500 + 95% of the time, this is awesome quality and the skew i can handle. 59.94fps would be even better, less rolling shutter.
 
Oedipax said:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/af64gf [MTS format, 61mb]

Here's a real codec torture test. Stock 14-140 lens @ 14mm, f/11, 1/800 shutter, ISO boosted a bit to 400 or so to compensate. Then just an outrageous whip pan back and forth. No mud spotted :)

Oh and this is using the "D" settings for AVCHD. The first shot I made outdoors with the "D" settings, my camera gave a message saying it stopped recording because of write speed limitations. I had to pull the battery in order to reset. Oddly when I made the same exact shot again, it didn't give any more errors and recorded fine. It only happened on that first shot.
Click to expand...


Just viewed it. Very sharp. Nice! If this was a year ago; the GH1 would have stolen Canon's thunder.... Timing is everything.
 
Oedipax said:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/af64gf [MTS format, 61mb]

Here's a real codec torture test. Stock 14-140 lens @ 14mm, f/11, 1/800 shutter, ISO boosted a bit to 400 or so to compensate. Then just an outrageous whip pan back and forth. No mud spotted :)

Oh and this is using the "D" settings for AVCHD. The first shot I made outdoors with the "D" settings, my camera gave a message saying it stopped recording because of write speed limitations. I had to pull the battery in order to reset. Oddly when I made the same exact shot again, it didn't give any more errors and recorded fine. It only happened on that first shot.
Click to expand...

There is mud in the dark areas of the trees but it's very minimal compared to what we would see in these same conditions on an un-modded camera.. :laugh:
 
Oedipax said:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/af64gf [MTS format, 61mb]

Here's a real codec torture test. Stock 14-140 lens @ 14mm, f/11, 1/800 shutter, ISO boosted a bit to 400 or so to compensate. Then just an outrageous whip pan back and forth. No mud spotted :)

Oh and this is using the "D" settings for AVCHD. The first shot I made outdoors with the "D" settings, my camera gave a message saying it stopped recording because of write speed limitations. I had to pull the battery in order to reset. Oddly when I made the same exact shot again, it didn't give any more errors and recorded fine. It only happened on that first shot.
Click to expand...

Dropping it in VLC and playing it slowed down at .1 speed is just like watching a bunch of stills in a slide show. I've not seen $50k video cameras capture footage as good as that under those conditions.

Sony Vegas reads the clip as .......
General
Name: GH1 2010.06.09 - Clip 14.MTS
Folder: C:\Users\ian\Desktop\gh1-14
Type: MPEG-2 Transport Stream
Size: 63.85 MB (65,378,304 bytes)
Created: Thursday, 10 June 2010, 10:05:42 AM
Modified: Wednesday, 9 June 2010, 6:59:56 PM
Accessed: Thursday, 10 June 2010, 10:05:42 AM
Attributes: Archive

Streams
Video: 00:00:11.472, 23.971 fps progressive, 1920x1080x12, AVC
Audio: 00:00:11.512, 48,000 Hz, Stereo, Dolby AC-3
 
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