GH2 gh2 hack newb question

S

Stephen Michael

Member
Hey guys, forgive me for this newbie question, but I've been a gh2 user for a little under a year now. I bought it used from a friend who'd hacked his with the 88Mb/s hack, then he took it on a shoot of his and re-installed the 176Mb/s hack for that. However, when I used it after the higher bitrate hack was installed, the amount of record space on my sd card (16GB sandisk extreme class 10 95Mb/s) stayed the same as it was with the lower of the two bitrates. With the higher bitrate, shouldn't I have less record time available than I previously did?

As I understood it, just the camera's firmware was being hacked, and as long as you had a fast enough card, you could use pretty much any card you wanted. Is that not the case? Essentially my question is - do all my cards have to be hacked? Because I've been under the impression that I was using a hacked gh2 and raving and loving the image quality out of it. If all this time I've just been using the stock firmware.....damn. placebo effect is the real deal.

Best,
Stephen
 
I'm not like, insanely familiar with those specific patches, however:

AVCHD is a variable bitrate codec. So, those numbers on the patches will represent their "peak" bitrates under strain / high detail / what have you.

You don't have to hack the cards... You just format them in camera before you shoot.
 
Some GH2 patches are variable bit-rate ( like the excellent FlowMotion ver 2.02 ) and some are fixed bit-rate. ( like Driftwood's All I-Frame patches )

The high bit-rate patches ( over 50 Mbps ) require high performance SD cards ( 35+ MB/sec write speed ) to function properly, and you will also need to use a SDXC UHS-I card if you want to span at high bit-rates.

If you own fairly fast SD cards, you may want to try out LPowell's FlowMotion ver 2.02 patch, which is a variable bit-rate patch, but it still delivers top notch image quality. ( the 24H setting will require a fast SD card as the data-rate can go up to 100 Mbps )
 
Thanks everyone for your responses. I didn't think I had to hack the cards separately. But I am still wondering why the amount of storage space for my cards didn't decrease with the higher bitrate patch. I read somewhere that if I had more than 10 mins per 8 gigs of card space then the camera wasn't hacked properly. Can anyone confirm/refute that?

Many thanks again, the advice I get from the gh2/dvxuser community is always insanely helpful!

Best,
Stephen
 
That totally depends on the hack you're using. However, I've never had the camera accurately read the exact record time available once hacked. The GH2 is much better at guessing the hacked record time than the GH1, but it's not accurate.

Try recording for awhile and see what you get. Also, assuming VBR, levels of detail in the frame will affect record time.
 
Anything shot using the AVCHD codec, patch or not, has a variable bitrate. There's no specific reason why your card time stays the same, but maybe after it's patched, it by default chooses the same record time on an empty card. But as soon as you start shooting, the times on the card will be different. Driftwood's patches are not constant bitrate. No patch is. MJPEG, i believe is constant.
 
Stephen Michael said:
Thanks everyone for your responses. I didn't think I had to hack the cards separately. But I am still wondering why the amount of storage space for my cards didn't decrease with the higher bitrate patch. I read somewhere that if I had more than 10 mins per 8 gigs of card space then the camera wasn't hacked properly. Can anyone confirm/refute that?

Many thanks again, the advice I get from the gh2/dvxuser community is always insanely helpful!

Best,
Stephen
Click to expand...

You're not being very specific. If you the card is empty, the record time will prolly be the same until you start recording. The camera is giving you an estimate time. You could theoretically shoot with your lens cap on for maybe 2 hours before your card runs out of space. Because codec is recording at its lowest bitrate. But if you shoot high detail stuff, like bushes, or grass, then you might have 5 minutes of record time. It probably just chooses the lowest possible bitrate and estimates how much time you have before the card is full.
 
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