GH2 official discussion thread

Vitaliy Kiselev said:
My small (sorry, not very large :-) ) interview concerning GH2 on 43rumors :-)
Titles "GH2 is the best (disastrous) camera for video shooters!”
http://www.43rumors.com/tester13-th...astrous-camera-for-video-shooters/#more-16420
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I'd honestly have to agree with your assessment. Actually, all the people I thought would buy GH1s actually bought T2I's instead and it was all over the issue of lenses (as some had EOS lenses already and no good adapter works).

I will say this though, I think the AF100 is going to be one of their most successful bodies if it works as well as Barry feels.

I do have a question for you, I am a CMOS engineer myself. You seem to have information on their sensors. Is it a yield problem they are having? Not getting enough that are coming out working at the levels they want? There is A LOT of variance in the CMOS process and at certain nodes, it is worse.

I wonder, do they work in 90nm? 45nm?
 
grimepoch said:
I do have a question for you, I am a CMOS engineer myself. You seem to have information on their sensors. Is it a yield problem they are having? Not getting enough that are coming out working at the levels they want? There is A LOT of variance in the CMOS process and at certain nodes, it is worse.
I wonder, do they work in 90nm? 45nm?
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All I have are bits of information. About problems with producing enough sensors.
I absolutely don't know any details. May be this problems are solved already.
It is new sensor and we can expect something like this.
As far as I remember GH1 had something like this at the start.
 
Personally, the behavior of Panasonic, the company, has turned me off to giving them any money whatsoever.

There are other viable competitors (and Scarlet is really what I want).

The ONLY reason I would even consider the Panasonics at all was the magically TRIPLED bitrate that was provided NOT by the company, but by an independent hacker.

Then the company locked the camera to prevent us from using it to the best of its ability. Pretty astounding and insulting, and twisted logic on their part. Since this locking will likely be present on GH2, I am highly skeptical. I don't trust Panasonic, at all. They have taken outrageous steps to limit their own customers from producing better footage with their cameras -- and continue to do so.

Whose side are they on?

Not mine, evidently.
 
polfilmblog said:
Whose side are they on?
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This is business, guys.
And they want to sell accessories and lenses.
They sell small number of lenses sold compared to leaders.
So, batteries are very important part of income .
Panasonic is widely known as king of protected batteries protocols.
All they did is protecting batteries sales. From managers POV.
Chinese guys already sell about 10x of the batteries.
And they'll reverse protocol used in GH2 in no time.
So, managers just do not want to be responsible for making firm decision
not to cripple third-party batteries. It is hard decision. Millions at stake.
 
After doing a preliminary analysis of some GH2 clips, and a few rough calculations, I estimate the basic quality of the 24Mbs 1080 24p footage appears to be roughly equivalent to what you would get from a hacked GH1 at about 35-40Mbs.

Chris
 
polfilmblog said:
There are other viable competitors (and Scarlet is really what I want).
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That's ridiculous. It's like saying "I don't like the performance of this Honda Civic because a Ferrari performs so much better".
The GHx is not a viable competitor to/with the Scarlet.
 
polfilmblog said:
Personally, the behavior of Panasonic, the company, has turned me off to giving them any money whatsoever.

There are other viable competitors (and Scarlet is really what I want).

The ONLY reason I would even consider the Panasonics at all was the magically TRIPLED bitrate that was provided NOT by the company, but by an independent hacker.

Then the company locked the camera to prevent us from using it to the best of its ability. Pretty astounding and insulting, and twisted logic on their part. Since this locking will likely be present on GH2, I am highly skeptical. I don't trust Panasonic, at all. They have taken outrageous steps to limit their own customers from producing better footage with their cameras -- and continue to do so.

Whose side are they on?

Not mine, evidently.
Click to expand...


I think that you should be a bit less critical about Panasonic. If there is one company which seems to be listening to us (low budget filmmakers or aspiring ones) it is Panasonic. You can' t compare a $900 hybrid consumer photo video camera to the $5000 scarlet. The more adequate comparison is the Panasonic Af-100 and even then for my taste I would choose the Pana above it because of the larger chip.

For one I am happy that I did not get a gh1 to hack because the GH2 seems to solve its main short coming with the codec and has brought live hdmi for monitoring. A function that has been asked a lot here. It still does have some issues, a very big one for me is the lack of 25p living in PAL land. It seems the best camera (from a Nikon user) to start doing 35mm type video and at least it will be here in the next months, not when it will be ready...
 
cbrandin said:
After doing a preliminary analysis of some GH2 clips, and a few rough calculations, I estimate the basic quality of the 24Mbs 1080 24p footage appears to be roughly equivalent to what you would get from a hacked GH1 at about 35-40Mbs.

Chris
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Thanks Chris!
 
What is the issue with 25p!

What is the issue with 25p!

they cant seriously not be able to do 1 extra fps!, hello.:furious3:

If what Chirs says the 24p is equal to roughly 30mb+hacked on GH1 then the 720p must be similarly improved too? which is good news and why the new 720p footage looks so detailed. All in all we have good and bad news:Drogar-Dolar(DBG):
 
cbrandin said:
After doing a preliminary analysis of some GH2 clips, and a few rough calculations, I estimate the basic quality of the 24Mbs 1080 24p footage appears to be roughly equivalent to what you would get from a hacked GH1 at about 35-40Mbs.
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Not too shabby. Any idea about the 720p equivalent?
 
I've only seen a couple of 720p clips that are claimed to be from a GH2. Either they didn't change the 720p encoder at all, or the clips aren't really from a GH2. There are no B frames in the clips and they do not support 24Mbps, so there isn't any potential quality improvement. Let's hope they weren't really from a GH2, or that Panasonic hasn't finished updating the 720p encoder yet.

Chris
 
cbrandin said:
After doing a preliminary analysis of some GH2 clips, and a few rough calculations, I estimate the basic quality of the 24Mbs 1080 24p footage appears to be roughly equivalent to what you would get from a hacked GH1 at about 35-40Mbs.
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Chris, could you please post the screenshots of GH2's 1080/24p clips analyzed by your latest Stream Analyzer and Elecard's StreamEye Pro (to take a peak at the other info not shown by StreamAnalyzer)?

As a side note, I'm personally amazed to see how flexible and rapid development can be in the wider community. To imagine for a second that Panasonic would implement a development program a'la Apple for GH3's release, giving access to the likes of Vitaliy, Chris, LPowell and other yet undiscovered talents to improve their product. What an opportunity ...
 
But do not our goals and theirs run in opposition.
As a corporation they are in it to maximize their buck while as consumers we are trying to minimize their buck.

Think for a second what the GH2 could have been like if all this hacking did not happen.

they could have simply did a few of the things in the hack ( and much quicker and easier as it is their design.) And called it the GH2

I think we now have the GH3 .....


opinions?

chime in!
 
larryfine451 said:
But do not our goals and theirs run in opposition.
As a corporation they are in it to maximize their buck while as consumers we are trying to minimize their buck.

Think for a second what the GH2 could have been like if all this hacking did not happen.

they could have simply did a few of the things in the hack ( and much quicker and easier as it is their design.) And called it the GH2

I think we now have the GH3 .....


opinions?

chime in!
Click to expand...

+1

I think we got the GH3 1 year ahead of time.
 
Attached are screenshots from the GH2. One is the 24Mbps 1080 24pN mode, one is 17Mbps 1080 25pW mode, and the third is 17Mbps 720 50p mode (you can tell which is which by looking at the labels or the Info Panels).

My calculation of comparable quality is based on the following assumptions for the new 24Mbps 1080 24pN mode:

The basic data rate has been increased to 24Mbps.

B frames are more efficient than P frames.

Image-wise B frames are equivalent to P frames.

If there were no B frames, and they had been replaced with P frames, and you calculate how big the GOP's would be if you had used P frames of an equivalent size to the existing P frames, you can estimate what the bitrate would have to be to accommodate the larger P frames instead of B frames.

Notice that the first GOP in the 1080 clips have an extra P frame at the beginning - I've seen this in all the 1080 clips I've examined. 1080 clips also contain a new PID stream (0x1200) - the stream is small and I have not yet determined what it is for. Also, the 25p clip has a GOP of 12 for all but the first GOP, instead of the 13 it used to be. I'm guessing this is so the B frame pattern can be consistent.

The 720p clip looks almost exactly the same as a GH1 clip (and is not 24Mbps). Also, the 720p clips do not contain the new PID stream. One difference is that the GOP is 24, not the 25 it used to be for 720 50p.

Chris
 

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