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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

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Peter Osinski

Peter Osinski

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Hello,

I have a hacked gh2 that pumps out about 132mb/s of avchd that I will be intercutting with red footage. I know i can natively cut avchd but I will likely be collaborating with someone who's computer can't handle the footage (amazingly it can handle r3d's just fine at a low enough working resolution).

What would be the best format to transcode my footage into that would come stock with cs5.5 and would not degrade my footage? 5dtorgb would provide files sizes that are prohibitively large so that won't do.

I am on windows so I am thinking what would be a prores type equivilalent for PC?

any help would be appreciated
 
Peter, as an aside how do you like your hacked GH2? I've been stubborn and haven't gone down that road. The GH2 is my run and gun cam on small projects where the RED or other professional cameras may not be the best fit. I was going to do a test next week with GH2 and Pix240 but because of the crippled HDMI I don't have high expectations.
 
Steve Sherrick said:
Peter, as an aside how do you like your hacked GH2? I've been stubborn and haven't gone down that road. The GH2 is my run and gun cam on small projects where the RED or other professional cameras may not be the best fit. I was going to do a test next week with GH2 and Pix240 but because of the crippled HDMI I don't have high expectations.
Click to expand...

Steve, listen. Especially if you are on this forum of all forums, you must go that route.

It is so much better, it is astounding. I run my own custom 3 GOP 88mbps, Aq3. The setting matters. Filesize is double, but it does not matter. Very high class, red like footage. Grades much much better, much less banding. Superior color, detail, grain pattern. Filmic cadence at 3gop.
 
I second cineform.

@ Steve: I've hacked my GH2 and use it intra now (i.e. GOp 1) at up to 178 mbps. Forget HDMI, I'm afraid it can't be hacked to produce a clean cadence.

If you need more information, ask me. I just published an extensive test (unfortunately ynot yet in print and in German anyway).
 
Uli Plank said:
I second cineform.

@ Steve: I've hacked my GH2 and use it intra now (i.e. GOp 1) at up to 178 mbps. Forget HDMI, I'm afraid it can't be hacked to produce a clean cadence.

If you need more information, ask me. I just published an extensive test (unfortunately ynot yet in print and in German anyway).
Click to expand...
Thanks Uli. Yeah, I knew the cadence would be a problem. There were some workarounds people were testing and I was curious but perhaps it's not even worth it right now. The hack is very intriguing. I'd love to see your test. That's a relatively high bitrate.
 
All those solutions to the f…cked up cadence from HDMI are very awkward in real life. Here is my short English version of the article:

Main advantage of the hack IMHO is the intra coding. You get the true sensor noise, changing frame to frame, not something blocky and jumpy because of massive inter-frame compression. It doesn't only look more filmic, but can be treated very efficiently with Neatvideo, if necessary. Depending on detail, I got data rates well over 100 mbps in real life (178 is a theoretical limit). If you think about it: AVC-Intra from Panasonic is encoding 10 bit 422 in 100 mbps, if we have over 100 mbps for 8 bit 420, that's pretty much visually lossless. I did tests with a Ninja attached and looked for images from the same point in time which were progressive (yes, some of them are). Exported them and made a difference overlay in Photoshop. The result was black to the naked eye! The same test without the hack showed very obvious differences. Only enhancing contrast by about 4 times showed minor differences.

No need for a Ninja any more, only a very fast card, we had success only with Sandisk Video Extreme rated 30 MB/s. One caveat: you can't shoot longer than about 4 minutes in a single take (remember shooting R1 on 8 GB cards?), since most scenes have too much detail and the camera can't span files any more (f…ckin FAT32). But that's OK for feature projects, isn't it?

The beauty of all this is getting rid of external recording and still getting images that survive minor grading – of course not as flexible as RAW, but impressive for this small and unobtrusive camera. And I like that I can adapt all my heritage glass to it. I have a whole bunch of rare Minoltas and some excellent Russian lenses. Oh, that old style look, so pleasing for portrait! Some of those old Minolta primes look more "Leica" than "Zeiss", if you know what I mean (actually, they co-operated for a while in lens development). And regarding viewfinder, freedom of aliasing and resolution, GH2 leaves any current DSLR in the dust.

It should make a nice companion to an Epic too. Have fun!
 
The 4 min limit could be a deal breaker for me when it comes to the projects I'd use it on. Hmm...I know this is getting way off topic and probably not appropriate for Reduser. Uli, I sent a PM. Maybe we could continue discussion there.

Thanks.
 
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