GH2 GH2 hack, need guidance

C

Chloe2

New member
Hello I am new to this forum thank you for visiting my thread. I have read several threads regarding different GH2 firmware hacks. I am primarily a stills photographer. I have two high school students who are doing a film making project. I am looking for a suitable hack for my GH2.
Question number one:
Do any of the firmwares allow you to adjust the bit rate, or are they set to on certain speed? I am asking this question because the students may have an issue with editing capacity, That is their machine is not a video editing PC. I have a Mac book Pro from 2007 with 8 GB of RAM, They are using a similar machine (a newer imac) and I do believe they will be using Final Cut Pro.
In short we want to have the best image quality possible but we do not want to overload our editing software and machine with files that are insanely large.
Question number two:
Does anyone have anything suggestions as to which firmware hack we should try?
thanks for any advice you may have
 
I've not found the higher bitrate hacks to affect ease of editing much (just the hard drive/memory card space requirements). The hacks record less compressed footage, so if anything, I'd think they'd generally be easier to edit on a slower computer. Also, all the footage gets decompressed during editing, so memory requirements don't seem to change, either.

That said, you may find the non-hacked GH2 might work fine for you. I'd recommend testing it out first, as most people aren't going to see a major difference in quality, and it might make your workflow easier.
 
Just use stock firmware.

IMO, they'll be best served by paying attention to their lighting, blocking, acting, and camera work rather than futzing with camera tech. Stock firmware is perfectly acceptable for a majority of uses, and won't trip them up if they happen to be using an SD card that's not properly spec'd for whatever hack is chosen.

FlowMotion is very close to 100% reliable, but the 24H mode will still occasionally choke on mere Class 10 cards.

Any of the "Apocalypse Now" versions is simply inviting a headache unless you have multiple, very expensive SanDisk 64GB 95mpbs cards. Those hacks are not reliable.

As to editing, FCP won't edit these files natively anyway, so they'll have to be transcoded to a version of ProRes for editing.

Just keep it stock and concentrate on the more important stuff.
 
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mcbob said:
Just use stock firmware.

IMO, they'll be best served by paying attention to their lighting, blocking, acting, and camera work rather than futzing with camera tech. Stock firmware is perfectly acceptable for a majority of uses, and won't trip them up if they happen to be using an SD card that's not properly spec'd for whatever hack is chosen.

FlowMotion is very close to 100% reliable, but the 24H mode will still occasionally choke on mere Class 10 cards.

Any of the "Apocalypse Now" versions is simply inviting a headache unless you have multiple, very expensive SanDisk 64GB 95mpbs cards. Those hacks are not reliable.

As to editing, FCP won't edit these files natively anyway, so they'll have to be transcoded to a version of ProRes for editing.

Just keep it stock and concentrate on the more important stuff.
Click to expand...

There is some truth to this, as I'm currently working on a presentation for a school that was shot with flowmotion in 24L, and still seems to have been overkill. There are a LOT of clips taken over a few days, and it bogs down my editor to load them all in on the same project. I often can't even play back smoothly in VLC because of the higher-than-normal bitrate. For this project, which is likely going to be projected off a standard definition DVD in a crowded room, the additional detail and resolution from the hack was not worth it. It just requires more space and resources to edit for no noticeable gain to the viewer.

HOWEVER... the reason I put flowmotion on in the first place was to have enough detail to be able to match other cameras without the picture fall apart during grading. I shot a concert with some other cams, including an AF100, and am so glad I used flowmotion. Not only was I able to apply a nice grade and color correct, it actually looked better than the AF100 when pixel peeping!
I also did some doc work recently, and didn't have time to fix white balance between rooms. Grading hacked footage holds up better than unhacked, so I'm thankful for that.

I still sort of wish I had gone with a lower bitrate hack or stock firmware for this local school project. It just doesn't seem worth the gobs of HD super crisp data for a 720x480 presentation that will be seen once.

This is why I've heard people actually keep around cards with various firmwares on it (stock, Flowmotion, custom, Driftwood, etc) so they can switch out in the field.

Personally, I'd like to find something with the stability of flowmotion but with a closer-to-stock bitrate.
 
Yes Ralph, I've heard you pitch it before. One of these days I'll check it out, but I'm always more reluctant to try something that is heavily pitched by its own creator- I'd be biased too if I were you. :)
 
M. Gilden said:
I'd be biased too if I were you.
:)
Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more. That's why I prefer to let pictures do the talking, or in this case, camera original footage. Here's a link to two files, a GH2 MTS clip shot with Sanity 5 and a simultaneous lossless HDMI capture. This is a night scene shot at ISO 3200 to see how closely Sanity could match the noise of the HDMI capture. The HDMI clip was captured with a Blackmagic Intensity card using the lossless UT Video codec. To see this clip you'll need to install UT on your machine. There are versions for both PC and Mac.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Ut-Video-Codec-Suite

And here's the link to the clips:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/mrqz4q
 
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