Hacked GH2 bitrate nowhere near 44 bits/s: WTF?

[bellsbells]

Hi all. I hacked my GH2 (Vanilla) and am filming in Creative Movie Mode (24p/24H). Yesterday I made a test shot which VideoSpec indicated was max bitrate 43.9, average 39. After shooting footage all day today with the same settings, I just analyzed my shots and found that though the max bitrate was still 43.9, the average was about 10-15 tops! WTF?! My SD card is a class 10 Sandisk (same as I used yesterday). What can explain why I'm getting such poor bitrates?

[bellsbells]

Please, anyone? I am shooting a documentary and I need an answer ASAP!

[Andrew Reid]

Don't worry about this. It is variable bitrate by nature (VBR) so only uses the amount of data it needs for the scene. Doesn't look like your shots are stressing the camera too much so you might want to try using the higher quality 88Mbit EOSHD Unified Patch.

[bellsbells]

Thanks Andrew—I think I will upgrade to Unified to see if that improves the bitrate. I'll report back once I've done so.

[bellsbells]

OK, I re-applied the hack with Unified and made a test shot of around 30 seconds to compare to a shot of the same length from when I was using Vanilla. I used VideoSpec to compare the two files, and here's what I get (both shooting Cinema 24p/24H):
Vanilla: max 43.4 Mbps / avg. 19 Mbps / file size approx. 80 MB
Unified: max 88.8 Mbps / avg. 66.9 Mbps / file size approx. 300 MB

So this is kind of nuts! The file is more than 3x the size when using Unified. Jeez, I don't know what to do now, since at that rate Unified will take up more disk space than I would like to dedicate.