The video on to has made by Gabriel de Bourg (found via Personal-View.com): “This is a test of the noise levels of a Panasonic GH2 with Driftwood’s “GOPStoppa” (176mb GOP1) patch. With the higher bitrates the camera resolves a lot better, but this applies to noise too. While it looks sharper, it also becomes clearer. Hence I wanted to do a test on the different noise levels. It was shot with the lens cap on using Nostalgic (-2, -2, 0, -2), shutter speed at 50 and white balance at 5600K. I’ve boosted the mids in After Effects, using Magic Bullet Colorista II. The original ungraded originals are avaiable here: megaupload.com/?d=5M4N08F1. Something I noticed is that it seems that ISO values based around 160 no longer seems to be the least noisiest, with ISO 320 performing very poorly. It surprised me, but after recording a new clip I got the same results.”
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22 Responses
176mbs? GOP1?
Are they f****g crazy? That’s nearly 1.3GB a minute. What’s the bloody point??? With GOP1 they might as well go back to MJPEG if the resolution is there to begin with, because there is no other advantage to AVCHD! Limiting such an advanced codec to Intra frames is just pointless… 🙁
With GOP1 there’s no temporal compression, only spacial. Each frame is a separate picture, rendering the movement as fluidly as film. The avg bitrate is lower than 176Mbs btw, and way less than professional codec, with a comparable IQ. That a $1000 camera can get that close to pro gear is amazing.
I know a bit well beyond the basics of MPEG 4. If you are using Intra frames (aka Keyframes) exclusively, why not use MJPEG then? What’s the point of AVCHD when there is no temporal compression or motion estimation? MJPEG is 10x easier to use/import/decode/support…
Is it a wider color space thing? I was even under the impression that the GH2 had a wider color space when using MJPEG. Am I dreaming???
i seem to remember it is because you cannot record certain frame rates on the gh2 with mpeg, 24p for example. back me up anyone who knows if this is true or false.
You’re right. It’s because GH’s MJPG only supports 720p and 30fps.
love the way everyone wants 24p, like your all filming saving privet ryan or working for cinima?
When shown on anything else its a mess… 60p people… 60p 🙂
i still prefer the mjpg format for editing anyway
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Interesting, ISO 320 and 1250 looks relatively bad.
The noisy ISO 320 is a bug. You have to set the ISO higher, say 400, then dial it down to 320 so it doesn’t produce the crazy noise.
Cheers dudeness!
What’s this ISO320 thing all about? Can you point us to some reports to it and how to avoid it?
Thanks in advance!
Here you go:
http://colorbyjorg.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/panasonic-gh2-iso-dial-bug-found-noise/
Confirmed here:
http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/1117/noise-test-panasonic-gh2-with-driftwoods-176mb-gop1
Best regards.
That’s weird, I only see a black screen mentioning different ISO-values.
Me too.
if you glance at an angle you can see differing levels of noise.
My understanding that this is analogue of a “brick wall shot” but for video, measuring the noise.
lol i think it should have beem mentioned that it wont be much fun for most viewers, cos it´s just a video of black (with some very hard to see noise). it´s more a test vid for video engineers, not really that accessable for most people.
If the in-cam noise is an issue then use the GH1.
GH1’s noise is far worse.
Well, what I meant to say was the noise on my GH13 is less than my GH2. I can only test the cams I have.
GH1 seem to have less noise at lower ISO on video
If you read the author’s own comments, he seems to say that the noise at low ISO is worse. This would be exactly in line with tests that show marginal increases in noise beyond a certain bitrate. So this would show the opposite of the original premise, that the higher bitrate is “clearer”. My own tests show that the GH2 noise is more intrusive as the bitrate exceeds 45. The difference, however, is slight.