Serious codec problems with GH2 - Solutions?

M

Maxwell77

New member
Hi,
I am a new owner of the Panasonic GH2. I want to use the camera for professional productions and made a lot of tests. I am really concern about the AVCHD codecs which Panasonic uses. The first thing I realized was a band which moves through the scene at a vertical pan. One band appears in the middle and one at the bottom of the scene and reduced details in a centered object. Very strange! This problem occures in the 720P AVCHD "High Quality"-mode.

The second problem are flickering lights! In the 24P-mode this seems to be a very big issue!
But I dont know why...I live in Germany. Here we have 50Hz AC. The lights should be flickering in the same frequency. I never realized these problems with other camcorders. I adjust the shutter from 25 to 640. At higher rates the flickering disappeared a bit. But it was still there. I also realized this problem in other situations.

The banding problem can be corrected when you turn of the I.Dynamic mode. After that I had no banding problems anymore. This is only my personal experience. Be careful.

The last thing I am very dissappointed about is the blocking in shadows. Fortunately I cannot see blocking in the 24P-mode. (perhaps the higher bitrate reduces blocking) But I have tested it not long enough. Does anybody have the same problems? Tomorrow I will contact Panasonic and send them the original footage.

If you need to see these videos I can post a link.

Best regards, Maxwell77
 
There are lots of threads about the flickering lights. I am assuming you are refering to fluroescent lights? Basically, PAL countries run on 50HZ as you know. Unless you are shooting 25p or 50i (or any multiple of 50 as far as I know) your shutter won't be in sync with the 50hz frequency. The solution when shooting 24p in PAL countries is to avoid fluorescent lights.
 
I'm gonna piggyback onto this thread... I am in North America, am using the GH2 in Cinema Mode with a 1/60th Shutter and get banding under every type of Fluorescent Light I come across.

From reading other threads on the subject, I thought/expected I wouldn't have any issues because I'm using the 60 Shutter. Doing testing, it gets worse the higher the shutter, then is almost gone at 1/40th.

Am I missing something other than setting it to 1/60 shutter?
 
The blocking is a huge problem to me too. I get it very strongly even in 24p mode when I shoot over iso 500. A bit less with 500 and lower. But on surfaces with fine patterns it is still there then. Guess it is partially caused by the low bitrate since I don't get it on the Canon 550D so much. But it could also be due to the compression algorithm that got praised so high in the first (paid?) reviews in the blogs. On the beautiful examples that tour the web these days you don't see it so much because they are all shot with very shallow depth of field (not much patterns there) plus you are already used to the compression artifacts of vimeo and youtube and such.

Flickering gets reduced with me only in 24p mode with a shutter of 50 or 25. I don't think it is the phase of electricity, since it also appears in daylight.

All we can hope, is that Panasonic releases a firmware fix that addresses this flickering.
 
Staven said:
I'm gonna piggyback onto this thread... I am in North America, am using the GH2 in Cinema Mode with a 1/60th Shutter and get banding under every type of Fluorescent Light I come across.

From reading other threads on the subject, I thought/expected I wouldn't have any issues because I'm using the 60 Shutter. Doing testing, it gets worse the higher the shutter, then is almost gone at 1/40th.

Am I missing something other than setting it to 1/60 shutter?
Click to expand...

I have been starting to notice this as well and would like some answers. Can anyone weigh in?
 
Hi,
I tried to reach Panasonic's technical development department to report the problem. But the call center could not help me. Does anybody knows the email address of the development department in Japan? This seems to be the only useful solution to archieve something.

Best regards, Maxwell77
 
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