Can you please provide an example as well as settings used?I think it's great that the bitrate upper limit has been raised for moving shots, but this doesn't help static shots. I can achieve an upper bitrate of 44-50 mbps when walking through grass and foliage, but when it comes to just putting the camera on a tripod the bitrate drops back to previous rates of around 8-10 mbps and the ugly compression shows up again. I understand that banding may not be solved simply through bitrate, but I sure would love to have a static shot that maintains a high bitrate to get rid of the blockiness.
I have been shooting static shots with high bitrate settings in 24PsF mode and see no compression artifacts. Bitrates do drop down in everyday static scenes, but that's because there is less information to be encoded as compared to scenes with motion. Also, very detailed static scenes (shooting the Death Chart) will always have higher bitrates than "everyday motion" ones. The good thing about AVCHD codec is that it only uses up as much storage as necessary to encode the scene.