hi all,

I have a hackjed panasonic GH1 and was led to believe that nothing touched it for video data rate.
I just did a sample filming at 1250iso and 125iso on both my GH1 and my 60D and when I look at the footage in windows 7 explorer, the canon shows as 45000kbps and the panasonci 18000kbps.

I'm basically trying to work out which is the best quality to decide which will be my main camera.

Could anyone explain if the 60d is actually meant to have a higher data rate than the GH1 or is windows explorer not telling the full story?

Many thanks
David

Bitrate is only one part of the puzzle (and lately, a very overrated piece).

The Canon DSLR's all have a high bitrate (about 45kbps, I think) because they need to compensate for their terrible quality encoder. On oversimplified explanation is that the hardware can't do all the maths fast enough so it wastes a lot of the bitrate on data that could've been compressed much more effieciently. With properly implemented h.264 and good hardware, 24mbps is perfectly sufficient to create excellent looking video, as demonstrated by the HMC150 and AF100.

The GH1 suffered from poor codec implementation and boosting the bitrate helped to aleviate some of the problems it had. However, that does not mean that bitrate is the primary determining factor in how good an image looks.

If you are trying to compare the quality between the two cameras, don't worry about what windows explorer is telling you. Watch the footage full scale on a larger TV and see which one you prefer. Colour, contrast, sharpness, aliasing, moire, macroblocking, tonal graduation, noise - these are all elements of an image which you will learn nothing about simply by looking at the data rate.